The Old Lund on Dad’s Reef

Two weeks

I dragged the Lund out of the shed and into the yard on Dad’s old trailer, which still had air in the tires if you didn’t ask them to do much.

Then I flipped the boat over onto sawhorses on the grass.

I filled the hull with a garden hose that evening and walked around it with a piece of chalk.

Eleven rivets were weeping. A twelfth had a pinhole crack in the seam beside it.

The man at the hardware store in town told me what Dad would have told me: clean them down to bright metal, dry them good, and seal them inside and out with a two-part marine epoxy.

I did it every night after my shift.

I’d get to Dad’s place at five thirty, eat a sandwich standing up and work until the light went, with the mosquitoes coming off the lake in clouds.

My job is helping people use their hands again. I know what patience does. I scraped and sanded each rivet like it was somebody’s knee, and I didn’t rush any of them.

The motor I couldn’t do myself. I hauled it on the tailgate to the marine shop on the highway, where a quiet man named Jim took one look and said, “Oscar’s motor. I remember this one.”

He rebuilt the carburetor, changed the impeller, put in new plugs and a fuel line, and charged me less than I knew he should have.

When I tried to argue, he said, “Your dad bought every part he ever needed from me. Call it even.”

I went to the deputy registrar in Grand Rapids on my lunch break and renewed the watercraft registration, which had lapsed sometime in the last century.

The clerk looked at the year on the old card and laughed out loud.

The tournament rules said every fish had to come in alive for weigh-in and go back in the lake after.

Grandpa’s Lund had no livewell, so I built one out of a big cooler, a bait aerator pump and a battery.

New bearings on the trailer. Two new tires. A new bilge pump. A fresh anchor rope.

I wrote all of it in a notebook, the way Dad always did, with the date and what I paid.

It came to a little under nine hundred dollars, most of it to Jim and the tire shop.

I didn’t care. It was money I would have spent on something, and nothing else would have felt like this.

Practice

The Wednesday before the tournament I put the Lund in the water for the first time.

Bud happened to be at the landing, trailering his own boat out, and he walked over with his hands in his pockets.

He looked at the dents and the chalky motor and the cooler bungeed to the middle seat.

He didn’t laugh. He tapped the hull twice with his knuckle, like he was knocking on a friend’s door.

“Oscar’s boat,” he said. “I’ll be darned. I fished with your grandpa once in this thing. He out-fished me four to one and never let me forget it.”

The motor started on the third pull. I idled out past the buoys with my heart going like a kid’s, opened her up, and the little Lund lifted and ran with her nose in the air.

It was nothing like Dad’s boat. In Dad’s boat you rode in a padded seat behind a windshield.

In the Lund you sat on a bench in the back with your hand on the tiller and felt every wave in your spine.

But she was dry. Not one drop came through those rivets. I ran her to the north end and back, three miles each way, and she didn’t miss a beat.

I fished the reef that night and the next, after work, in the long May evenings when the light lasts until almost ten.

I didn’t keep anything. I just wanted to know where the fish were sitting.

They were on the inside edge, where the rock breaks off into soft bottom, in about fourteen feet.

It was exactly where Dad would have said they’d be in late May, with the water still cold.