Recently, I began to realize that I really hate living in a part of the country where I can’t boat at all for at least five months of the year. As I get older, I am more focused on what I love in my life, and what I can sacrifice to do what I love. I long for boating more and more. Maybe that’s because like most folks who work hard for their living, I find myself boating less.

Seasonality has a lot to do with it. For example, for most of my life I’ve loved winters in my home state of New York. As an avid snowmobiler, it was easy for me to put the boats away in November and get the sleds out for a season of riding. When we had snowy winters with icy cold temperatures, snowmobiling was great and winter couldn’t last long enough. I loved the crunchy feeling of snow under my boots in sub-20 degree weather, and thoughts of boating were way back in the “other season” corners of my mind. When early April came around, boating moved to the forefront again, and I was ready for the sounds of a chattering pad and high-winding V-6 outboard.

YEAR-AROUND FOCUS
These days, I don’t own snowmobiles anymore, and use my winters to work on my boats and outboards in my heated shop, dreaming of the days soon to come when the ice will melt, and I can once again rip up the lake. Dad used to remark that I liked working on my boats more than riding in them. Though I like working on boats all winter, when the water’s right I want to ride in the boat.
I’m sure I’m no different than most. Everyone’s busy these days, and time on the water is precious. To that end, one of my wishes before I get too old is to move south, where I can boat just about year-around. Though I’ll lose that special feeling I get in Spring, I’ll gain the reliability and sameness of being able to boat when I want — no, when I can.

BASS COUNTRY
I’ve spent a lot of time in the South, and it’s clear that bass fishing (and outboard performance boating) is much more popular and mainstream than it is in the northern states. Sure, we have bass and walleye tournaments on local lakes here in Upstate New York … just a few each summer, more or less. In the South, though, it seems most lakes have a bass tournament every week. I’ve been to lakes in the Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee, Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama where the launch ramp on any given Saturday was so crowded with custom bass boat trailers, it was almost impossible to launch or retrieve without a protracted wait.

In most northern states, that’s not the case. Tubers, PWC enthusiasts and weekend boaters dominate the ramps here. On my lake, it’s a rare treat to see a bass boat ripping down the channel with the hull flying nose-high and the engine trimmed, rooster tail flying low and long. I always run to the door to see what brand the boat is, and how it looks as it hustles past my house. I suspect that if I lived on the water in the South, that would be a daily (maybe hourly?) occurrence. I sure hope so. I don’t think I’d ever get tired of that.

It’s also easier to get parts locally in the South, even in the dead of winter, because most marinas don’t close up in the off-season like they do up north. As a diehard boater, there’s nothing more depressing than traveling around the northern states and seeing shrink-wrapped boats laid up for winter, and boatyards with doors shuttered in the off-season.

HORSES IN THE STABLE
As I type this column, the mercury stands at 11 degrees F, the snow is piled high outside my office door, and my boats sit impatiently in the shop, like horses in the stable — batteries trickle charging, engines eerily silent, hulls cushioned on carpeted trailer bunks, as the minutes, hours, days, weeks and months of dead-cold white winter inch by.

So I daydream, thinking of a slight wind chop, just enough to free up that pad, and a thin cloud of two-stroke smoke, just a hint of blue on a
still spring morning. I crank the engine, warming its innards as it idles in neutral, then after pulling away from the dock, ease it onto plane, pressing the foot throttle smoothly and firmly. We are together again. The engine responds with raw power, and as the tach and speedometer swing around the dial together, the hull ever-rising on its V-wings of flight, we’re off and skating across the tips of the chop with a staccato ripple … winter a distant memory again.

John Tiger Jr. is Senior Technical Field Editor and a key freelance contributor to BWB magazine.