It was raining in the canoe on the bay lake. A hard rain. The kind of rain that encouraged my wife try like hell to bail water with her coffee cup.

Two days earlier…

It was a Friday. The crew and I assembled in the aft quarters to review the weather reports. They said there was a 10% chance of rain on Saturday and a 30% chance on Sunday. We decided to depart on Sunday.

One day earlier…

On one hand it was a good decision to delay because it gave us an extra day to perform dry runs. We ran equipment checks and drills. Our first trip had caught us unprepared. I’d be damned if that was going to happen on my watch.

We took some time on Saturday and got the rigging down to a science. That last portage had almost killed us.

While the canoe was out of the garage, we decided to go home improvement on this old house. For some strange reason we were tired of dry dock consisting of the canoe precariously balanced on the refrigerator and an old bookcase.

How To Have Fun In A Canoe
Lean in the same direction as your companion. This is also known as “swimming.”

A one-hour construction project was about to go 500 percent past deadline.
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