On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:30:58 +0000, Larry wrote:

cavelamb wrote in news:C-
:

She's 18 years old, Larry - hardly in "show room" condition.
She has some battle damage - but nothing terrible.

She's just new to us, so we've put a bit of elbow grease into
making her sparkle a bit - for the commissioning party!

A week later she's "normal" again.




I took my 16' jetboat up to "Bushy Park", an earthen dam that simply
separated the brackish water of the Cooper River from fresh water that
comes down a canal from up the Cooper far enough to be all fresh from
the lake. It's a reservoir for our water system. There's a boat ramp
on both sides the county maintains with nice floating aluminum docks and
paved parking/ramps.

I launched the jetboat in the salt side for a trip up the Cooper, then
back down the canal upriver into the reservoir, a very nice daytrip on
the river in beautiful weather that can be extended to go all the way up
to the dam, through the free lock into the lake and back if there's
time.

I tied the boat up to the dock by the launching ramps and across the
dock from there was a little girl sitting in a very old runabout that
had seen most of its life powered by a tired old Evinrude, a boat for
the less fortunate of us.

She said to me, very proudly, "This is my daddy's new boat! Isn't she
beautiful?!" with a smile that was several orders of magnitude brighter
than the hot South Carolina sun. I complimented her on her fine craft
and, upon reinspection, could see it was the finest vessel on the river
that day. How could anyone think otherwise by such a brightly-lit main
deck, brighter than anything else in view?

As I parked the car in the lot, I just felt this was going to be a
special day. It already had been.....(c;]

Funny how cracked plastic seats look so much different when such a
pretty little girl was sitting in them.....

Our 16 foot jet boat is Turbocraft hull # 10, the first ones ever sold
fifty years ago. It has been painted and had new upholstery in all
that time.