(HOST) Two summers ago, film make, teacher and commentator Jay Craven bought a seventeen-foot, forty-year old sailboat that turned out to be a bit more than he could handle.
(CRAVEN) I acted on impulse, fantasizing about taking to the road with my family, finding lakes we could navigate by day, then screening my film "Disappearances" in town halls at night.
My family wasn’t as keen on the boat as I’d hoped, so I toured solo to most of my film dates. By the time I got the vessel to water it was mid-August – with a stiff north wind that signaled autumn. I swore I’d launch it anyway.
Unable to raise our sail, we paddled hard against the gale, but my son Jasper’s oar broke. Then we crashed into two boats tied to a dock, and veered toward rocks jutting up in front of us.
I felt like the skipper of the Exxon Valdez.
My wife and son looked to me.
"We’ll put up the sail," I said.
"What?" said Bess. "A near hurricane’s blowing straight at us."
Jasper and I hurriedly raised the sail, but wind knocked us over. So we pulled it down again.
"OK," I said. "Into the water. We’ll walk the boat back to the landing."
"How?" said Jasper.
"Like Swamp Fox," I said, dropping into the lake.
"Who’s Swamp Fox?" he asked.
"A southern Revolutionary War fighter," I said. "He tricked the British by fighting from swamps. Disney made a movie about him. Starring Leslie Nielson."
"The guy from "Naked Gun" and "Mister Magoo?" asked Jasper.
"That’s him." I said. "Now get in the water."
Jasper and Bess jumped overboard. Fully clothed, we dragged the boat back to the launch, where I slipped the on the algae-covered concrete.
Two State Troopers were watching nearby. "We don’t really know what we’re doing," I said.
"I can see that," said the male trooper. "Consider yourself lucky. We saw a guy this morning – drove his boat under telephone lines. Broke his mast off."
"We are lucky," I said, as I leaned my sixteen-foot mast back off its hinge. It promptly snagged in a tree and crashed into the water, snapping off at the base.
I felt like I was wearing giant rubber ears.
Then I remembered – my boat trailer had no license plate. "We’ll work this out," I said to the troopers. "You guys can take off." But by now the female trooper was circling my car.
"Trailer’s not registered," she said. "Neither’s your car. Expired two weeks ago."
I rooted around in my glove compartment and found new stickers.
"These are duplicates of last year’s," she said.
The male trooper looked in my car. "In a situation like this, we’d also expect to find a case of empty beer cans in the back seat."
Luckily the only thing in the back was a pile of overdue DVD’s, so the troopers let us off the hook. But my Subaru died a couple weeks later and my Mini-Cooper’s too small to pull the boat. So now it sits by the barn – both the boat and I very much in need of a second wind.