The Old Lund on Dad’s Reef

The sign-up

I signed up at the landing the Thursday evening before the tournament.

Bud had a card table set up under the pavilion roof with the entry forms, a cash box and a coffee can full of pens.

The entry fee was a hundred dollars a boat. There were forty spots filled already.

I wrote my name on the form, checked the box marked one-person team, and wrote down the boat: sixteen-foot Lund, twenty-five horse tiller.

Bud read the form twice. He took his glasses off, cleaned them on his shirt, put them back on and read it a third time.

“Sixteen foot?” he said.

“Rules say a boat, Bud.”

He looked at me a long second, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

Then he took my hundred dollars, counted it, put it in the cash box and wrote me in as boat thirty-eight.

“Life vest on whenever that motor’s running,” he said. “Check-in at two o’clock sharp. You’re late, your fish don’t count. That goes for everybody.”

“I know the rules,” I said. “Dad made me read them out loud every year.”

Something moved in his face. “He did, didn’t he,” Bud said. “Every year. Like you were going to forget.”

Forty-one boats. Thirty-nine of them were seventeen feet or longer, most with a big motor and a padded seat and three screens on the console. And then there was mine.

Tournament morning

I didn’t sleep much. At three thirty I gave up, made coffee in a thermos and drove out to the landing with the Lund rattling behind my pickup on the gravel road.

Tournament boats launch in order of their numbers, in flights of ten, after a safety check at the dock.

Boat thirty-eight goes in the fourth flight. That meant I’d be among the last to leave the landing.

By the time I got there, trucks lined both sides of the road.

I heard people talking quietly in the dark, the clink of rods going into lockers, the low rumble of big motors warming up at the dock.

Dad’s boat was there, near the front of the line. Dwayne was boat number five.

He was standing beside the trailer drinking coffee with two other men, and when he saw the Lund pull in behind my truck, he stopped talking.

He looked at it a long time. Then he looked at me. He didn’t say anything, and neither did I.

He turned back to his coffee, but he wasn’t really listening to the men beside him anymore.

When my flight was called, I idled the Lund up to the dock where Bud’s volunteers checked each boat.

A young man looked at my cooler livewell, turned on the pump to hear it bubble, checked the vest, the throwable cushion and the registration.

“You’re good,” he said. Then, quieter, “Good luck, ma’am. My grandpa had one of these.”