The Patch at the Boat Ramp

Thursday

Tobin came down the hill when he saw me unloading. He is near eighty, with a bad hip and a slow walk, and he brought me a folding lawn chair I never once sat in.

“You going to do that yourself?” he asked.

“Dad did it a hundred times,” I said. “I helped him on about forty of them.”

He nodded, and he looked at the hole, and he looked at me. “Your daddy did it right,” he said. “Don’t you rush it.”

The first job was cutting out everything that was broken. You cannot lay new glass on top of cracked glass and expect it to hold. It has to go back to good, sound material, or the patch just floats on top of the damage like a scab.

I put on my safety glasses and Dad’s red cap and a dust mask, and I started the grinder. Fiberglass dust is miserable stuff. It gets in your sleeves and your collar and itches for days.

I ground the broken glass out until the hole was clean and round, then I tapered the edges back, wide and shallow. Dad’s card said twelve to one. For every bit of thickness, you grind back twelve times that far, so the new glass has plenty of surface to grab.

That meant grinding a circle almost two feet across around a hole the size of a dinner plate. My arms shook by the end. My shoulders burned. I stopped twice to drink water and once to sit on the tailgate and not cry.

Then I opened the front compartment and checked the foam. Bass boats have flotation foam in the hull. If it is soaked, it holds water and rots and adds weight, and the marina man had worried about that.

It was damp at the bottom near the hole, but not soaked through. I cut the wet part out with a long knife and propped the lid open so the afternoon air could get at it.

By four o’clock the inside was dry enough. I wiped the whole ground area down with acetone, inside and out, and it flashed off in the cool air.

Dad’s card said to start from the inside if you can reach it. A backing layer on the inside gives the outside patch something to build against. I could just reach it through the front compartment, lying on my belly with my head and shoulders down inside the bow.

I cut three pieces of cloth, each a little bigger than the last. I mixed the resin in small batches the way Dad’s card said, because epoxy that is mixed too big gets hot in the cup and kicks before you can use it.

I wet out the cloth on a piece of cardboard, and then I reached down into the bow and laid it over the inside of the hole, and smoothed it flat with my gloved fingers until there was not one bubble left.

I did it three times. When I backed out of that compartment, my hair was full of fiberglass dust and my neck was cramped and the sun was going down behind the bluff. But the inside was laid.

I covered the bow with a tarp, said a prayer over it, which Dad always did and which I felt foolish doing until I did it, and drove home.