That Time Our Boat Blew Up

I wish I could say I’m surprised when bad things happen to me, but I’m not. I’m used to it. After a while you just come to expect everything to go wrong. It just seems like that whole when bad things happen to good people saying. I’m not saying this is a bad thing because if bad things are going to happen to anybody, hey, bring it on! I’m one of the few that can handle quite a bit before it completely breaks me. I’ve been through enough that I consider myself a strong individual and don’t let a lot get to me. I make the best of what I’ve got and go from there. 

So as I’m sure you can tell this past weekend didn’t exactly go as planned. Well, most of it did except one minor detail. Our boat. We have a nice boat… fairly new, clean, amazing sound system, ideal for wakeboarding, surfing, tanning … you get the gist.

We were up at Bear Lake for Memorial Day weekend. Our condo community has an annual clean up day and that was the main reason for going up there but we thought we’d bring the boat. We knew the water would be freezing still (we’re talking 50 degrees) so we left the wakeboards and surfboards at home. Saturday after the clean up we decided we’d go put the boat in and just go hang out on the lake.

We got to the marina and picked up our annual pass, had the boat inspected, showed them our form saying we’re not contaminated with muscles, and were ready to put the boat in. This all took quite a while… we lost the slip from the inspection within a matter of seconds and they told us we didn’t need to fill out a muscle form and then later requested we did… which was clear back at the front gate. We finally got to the launch ramp and backed the boat down. The boat wouldn’t go off the trailer. Well, in the midst of everything else, we had forgotten to unhook the back straps so up the ramp we went. Then the boat was already too far back so we had to go back into the water to get it up to the front of the trailer again. After that, back up the ramp to unstrap the back and finally the boat was in the lake. (That was a lot of back and forths, did you keep up? Did it even make sense?)

Looking back now, we should’ve realized this was a sign… DO NOT GO BOATING. Talk about an omen.

Once outside the marina we cruised around getting the boat warmed up and all seemed fine (it was the first time we've had it out this year). After doing that for about 5 minutes we headed to the south end of the lake. We had the music up loud, cruisin’ down the lake when we heard this loud explosion. It had to have been really loud because it was extremely audible with the music and boat on and I can only imagine what it was without the extra noise. We stopped immediately because we didn’t know what it was. The smell was a good indicator that things weren’t all right. I was convinced the whole boat was going to turn into a bomb and blow any second. My dad opened the engine cover and sure enough there was smoke. Now I’m not talking a cute little trail of smoke coming from a campfire with a burnt s’more in it kind of smoke. I’m talking a big huge heaping gray cloud of your boat just blew up kind of smoke. And that was the end of our weekend of boating. My dad got the oars out… I just kinda looked at him. The only good those were going to do for us was provide us an opportunity to better our jousting skills. 

Rewind to getting our boat inspected. The ranger that was inspecting the boat was talking to the girl he was training. He asked about oars but told the girl that it really wasn’t applicable because if the boat was over 21 feet long an oar wasn’t going to do you any good, “You could paddle all day and it wouldn’t get you anywhere.” Cue Kylie’s head thinking, “yeah, good thing that will never happen to us.”  And then reality slapped me in the face.

After playing a good game of phone tag and scrounging up phone numbers we finally had our amazing neighbors call and tell us they were on their way to the marina to come and tow us in. After a long slow drive pull back to the marina we managed to get the boat back on the trailer and that was that. Our boat blew up. 

Then my dad came down this morning while I was cleaning the bathroom before we left and says, "Hey Ky, the lakes really smooth, do you want to try the boat again? (insert long pause as Kylie was processing this) we can just use the oars and paddle around." 

**Bachelorette starts tonight... check back for my weekly posts**