Dec 11 2021

The Lake Show

Yesterday I posted to Twitter and LinkedIn

We are here for the show. Video at 11. Or rather on the 11th.

The “Lake” Show that Nancy, Bueller, and I saw yesterday, was family and friends bringing the family houseboat out of the water and up to the bank for some major repairs.

It’s a “rodeo” that a family (Nancy’s) that’s had many houseboats on Lake James, going back to 1963, has been to before.

Two of the family teenagers were brought to participate, as this is how this particular tribal knowledge is passed on, 1 generation to the next.

Watch this GIF to see them flip the boat around before hauling it to the ramp. Good thing it was a calm, windless day.

The houseboat’s canopy frame had to be taken down first – as some power lines had to be ducked, going up the ramp.

Tribal Knowledge – most likely from past experiences had someone thinking, performing Cognitive Tasks before, during, and after the Behavioral Tasks necessary, about “What could go wrong.” And … Learning in the WorkFlow.

My self-appointed job was to video this – as all the family had from prior efforts were a couple of photos.

This following video taken with my smartphone, is “only” 17:09 minutes in length – and as might be expected – there’s a lot of downtime – but not as much as the longer video taken with my digital video camera sitting mostly on a tripod – that’s almost 90 minutes long. Yes, I was multi-tasking-videoing.

The ’63 boat before this one had been brought out twice in the late 80s and in about 2010, and the 2nd time the damage was so great that the first boat was eventually replaced by this one in 2014.

This one – that I named The Turtle Bite Boat – was damaged a few years back when a big storm ripped her from her slip and moorings at the mouth of the cove (with the million-dollar view), spinning her around and to the shoreline near the ramp, doing minor damage to other houseboats and herself along the way.

A year before I had my two knees replaced in 2019 we gave our houseboat, conditionally, to our daughter and her family – to keep it in the family and pass the boat and slip – on to the next generation. It had become problematic to take her out and bring her back in – the last time being during the eclipse on August 21, 2017.

Here’s the youngest grandson watching the No Wake buoy as we depart from our slip and head out to the northeast corner of Lake James to watch the eclipse with our special sunglasses.

I’ve added a photo below of Nancy’s first husband, the late Carroll Setzer, supervising his brother’s, (Butchie – Larry), boat going into Lake James back in the day. Same boat ramp from probably 25 years ago.

Yesterday it was Butchie’s son, Richard, who drove the truck to haul our houseboat out. What goes around, comes around. That’s family. The one that (fairly) graciously allowed me, a Northern Yankee, into their sphere.

Nothing Goes Completely Smoothly When You’re Dealing With Boats

All sailors know this to be true.

The trailer’s wheels went into a huge hole (depression) at the end of the ramp yesterday, causing some confusion, and some careful consideration and then yelled communications among the ring-leaders of this rodeo, using all their past experiences and present-day insights, to guide them through this, The Show.

But…

No drama. No houseboat falling off the trailer and rolling around.

Some might have been disappointed. But mostly we were all relieved.

Now, the real challenges, time and expense, begins. Here’s the daughter (below) who is getting the keys.

I wonder if she knows what she’s really getting into.

This was the aspirational poster I made for our getaway… so as to have something to quietly point to, to whoever might want to bring any drama onboard.