Gogebic County Hates Me

The rumor around the lake is that Gogebic County hates us. That’s why getting my boat in the water was such a disaster this year.

Because I have an inkling that the connection may not be immediately obvious to you, let me offer something in the way of explanation.

A man who knows something about it, our UPS driver, tells us that East Duck Lake Road is the worst road in the county. About half way down the five miles to Land O’ Lakes it transitions from old, bumpy blacktop to potholed gravel. There’s a lively debate about which is worse, but in spring, before the county gets around to weakly tossing some patch onto the black top and some gravel into the potholes, it’s a carnival ride.

To make matters still more complicated I bought a new battery charger. I store my boat in an unheated garage and so, every spring I need to recharge the batteries that power the trolling motor, the live well, the bilge pump, the lights and, most crucially, the ignition for the outboard.

I thought the old charger took too long — sometimes a few days — to charge the batteries and so I bought a more powerful new one. The trouble is that with higher quality comes more technology. The old one you just plugged into a socket on one end and clamped to the battery on the other and when the yellow “charging” light turned into a steady green “charged” light you knew the battery was charged. You didn’t need a degree in electrical engineering to figure it out.

This new one has a “mode” button. You’re supposed to push it to select the kind of battery you’re trying to charge. It has 12V, 12V Lithium and 6V options. So, I looked at my battery to tell me which one it was. It didn’t say. Because 12V was the first option I just assumed that was the most common one and so I just left it there and began the charging.

It took longer than I thought it should have, but maybe it was closer to a day then two days, so I thought that was a plus. But eventually, just as the instructions predicted, only the green light was lit and it was steady and strong. I figured I had guessed right and the batteries were now fully charged. I was ready to take my boat to the boat launch.

Here’s where Gogebic County comes back in. The ramp is two bumpy miles away. I drove slowly and I endeavored to avoid as many craters as possible, but there was still plenty of jostling to be had.

Now, let me pause right here for a word about backing a boat trailer down a ramp into a lake. For the average person it is one of life’s most difficult challenges. In fact, to get a boat into the lake on the first try is like getting into Harvard or like winning the lottery or like the Brewers winning the World Series. Either it’s extremely unlikely or it has actually never happened.

This is not true for guys who do it a lot. Like everything else except golf, you get better at it the more you do it. But I just put my boat in the lake once in the spring and take it out again in the fall. I don’t get much practice.

And so, since guys at boat landings are likely to be guys who do this all the time and could back a boat into a lake in their sleep, I do not want an audience. “Hey, Al, isn’t that guy screwing around trying to get his boat in the same guy who doesn’t stain his cabin?”

So, a good time to avoid an audience is mid day since most fishermen like to go out in the early morning or evening. But you also have to take into account the wind because the windier it is the harder it will be to manage the boat once you have it in and the harder it will be to land the thing at your own dock. Unfortunately, the two timing goals conflict since mid day is when you’re likely to have the most wind.

So, when you find that sweet spot you of no audience and low wind you need to seize the moment as I did last Friday. I summoned Dianne and we drove gingerly along Gogebic County’s pot-holed road while I went on and on about how much we pay in taxes and, yeah I know, most of it goes to schools and schools are good, but why aren’t more kids going into civil engineering where they would, oh I don’t know, design smooth roads or, better yet, forgo college altogether and earn good, family supporting union wages on a road crew?

We finally arrived at the boat landing and I positioned Dianne on the boat landing dock to direct me and I maneuvered the boat so it was lined up with the ramp. Then I commenced my backing-in technique. You turn the wheel left and the boat goes right. Or is it you turn it right and the boat goes right? It’s not good to be having this debate in your own head in the moment that you’re actually performing this activity. Better to just go with the flow and react to things as they occur. Like so many things in life, thinking just gets in the way. Be in the moment. Don’t steer the boat. Be the boat.

And I got ‘er in there on my first try. A record.

Now there was a slight glitch. I had forgotten to put the plug in, so the bottom of my boat was rapidly filling up with water. The owner’s manual tells me that when a boat fills with water there’s a high probability of it sinking. So, still on the trailer, I pulled the boat back out to let it drain, inserted the plug and backed it back in. Now, nitpickers may claim that this counted as my second attempt, but if you ask for a ruling from the replay officials over in Bessemer they’d confirm my original call or, at the very least. let the call stand for lack of incontrovertible evidence that I was wrong the first time.

Gleaming with pride while Dianne was impressed with her husband and apparently letting the whole plug thing go by the by, I climbed in and pressed the button that lowers the outboard into the water. And… nothing happened. I pressed it again, harder. I checked the battery connections. I pressed again. Nothing again.

At this point I started to express my concerns in terms that were both heartfelt and passionate. My immediate conclusion was that the fancy new battery charger had not really worked after all, that I had needed to find the right mode, that I had spent a day charging in the wrong mode and so had been fooled into believing that I had done what I had not. I felt I had been emasculated by technology. I began to understand the motivations of Trump voters.

So, defeated, I pulled the boat out of the water and we retraced the bumpy ride back to the cabin. Now I had a new problem: where to park the boat. See, I usually only bring the boat back in the fall when I’m ready to store it for the winter. In that event, I need to back the boat into the garage, a procedure that takes about a week and a half if all goes right.

I did not want to do this, but I also couldn’t leave it on the road and I didn’t want to clog our driveway. I was also keenly aware that any place I left the boat meant that I’d have to find a way to get it out of there at some point.

We’ll skip ahead here and just inform our readers that a semi-happy solution was hit upon whereby I think there’s a good 50% chance that I’ll be able to get the boat out when I take my next run at this and, if not, we can always entertain guests in the boat as a sort of auxiliary patio in the woods.

Next I had to figure out what the heck went wrong. So, I recharged my batteries, this time using the old reliable, but slow, charger. The weird thing was that it wasn’t slow. The green light came on after only about a half hour, suggesting that maybe the battery had been charged all along and that the mode question that had so bedeviled me was moot.

All of which led me to think that the problem was someplace in the wiring. This was not good as it meant I’d probably have to get the boat down to the boat place where a guy would have to look at it. This happened a few years ago when my boat also wouldn’t start. I drove it down to the place and the guy said, “let me have a look.” He had a look and then he picked up the fuel line and attached it to the motor, explaining that the gas has a difficult time making it into the outboard when the fuel line is not attached. That was a very dark day for me, though it probably made the summer for the guy at the boat place. You’d think I’d take some solace in bringing that much joy into another’s life, but I did not.

Anyway, I started jiggling wires. This does not work as well in the digital age, but I’ve found through long experience that just nudging stuff or striking it just right with a hammer often does the trick.

And ya know, it sure did. I tried the button again and, sure enough, the motor moved, confirming power was once again flowing.– both into the motor and through my veins. Through dogged, fierce determination and the ingenuity and resourcefulness that has made this the greatest county on earth, I had solved another problem. Remember the movie “Apollo 13” where between Tom Hanks, Gary Sinese and Ed Harris they “worked the problem, people” and brought three astronauts safely back to earth? It was much like that.

Which brings us back full circle to my beef with Gogebic County. Because of their crummy road my battery had been jostled out of position, resulting in my humiliation at the boat landing.

You don’t think they know I’m from Madison? You don’t think there’s a camera at the landing? You don’t think that at county board meetings they don’t adjourn into closed “executive session”, pop some corn, crack open a few beers and watch people from Madison and Chicago scream at their boats? “Hey, look at that guy! And he was so proud he actually got the boat in the lake in the first place! And, hey, isn’t he the guy who needs to stain his cabin?”