You’ve had the boat out, what, once this year? If you’re like most people around here it’s once, maybe twice, and we’re already halfway through June. It’s been parked in the driveway since sometime in May, all washed up and waiting on you. There was the rainy stretch, then somebody’s graduation, and a couple of the good Saturdays you just didn’t get moving in time, which is usually how it goes.
A Maine summer is shorter than it has any business being. Sit down sometime and count the weekends between now and Labor Day where the weather cooperates and the water’s warm and nobody in the house has somewhere else they’re supposed to be. You’ll get to about a dozen. The ends give you a few more, late May and on into September before it turns cold, so fifteen or so all told, and then the lake’s locked up under ice again. A couple of those fifteen it’ll rain on you anyway. So you’re really building a whole summer around ten or twelve days, whether you ever think of it that way or not.
Truth is, getting out more has next to nothing to do with money or gear. It’s about not handing yourself an easy reason to bail, and the easiest one going is a boat that isn’t ready to go. Most people don’t skip a Saturday because they’d rather be home. They skip it because getting out has turned into a forty-five-minute project before you’ve even left the yard. The straps aren’t where you swear you left them, the drain plug’s gone wandering again, and you’re standing in the garage wondering if there’s even gas enough to be worth the trip. Do that three weekends running and you stop trying. So keep gas in it. And that plug, look, just buy a few spares, they run a couple bucks, and stash them everywhere, the glovebox, the boat, a drawer somewhere. The first time you back the trailer down the ramp without one and stand there watching the water climb up over the floorboards, it’ll click why I’m harping on it.
The other thing that eats a morning is standing around deciding where to go. Settle that the night before, or just keep a default, because nine o’clock Saturday with everybody in the kitchen wanting a different lake is no way to start a day. I rotate the same few. If I’ve got the whole day and I want room to spread out, that’s Cobbosseecontee. Parker Pond is where I go when I want it quiet, which is most of the time now, I’ve gotten less patient with a crowded launch as I’ve gotten older. The Androscoggin I save for weeknights, since I can be on it inside twenty minutes and back home before dark without it swallowing the whole evening.
Load the truck the night before while you’re at it. Feels too obvious to even say. But the cooler and the towels and the kids’ life jackets that otherwise vanish into the back of the garage, get all of it in there Friday night and you’re on the water Saturday morning instead of still hunting for the sunscreen at ten.
And don’t get it in your head that every trip has to be some big event. A few of the best evenings I’ve had out there barely counted as trips, just a Tuesday after supper, putt around for an hour with a cold drink, home before it’s even properly dark. Those count too. Some of them stick with you longer than the big Saturdays do, and I couldn’t tell you why.
All of this is easier with a pontoon, and yeah, I’m biased. Doesn’t make it less true. There’s nothing to wrestle with. You step on flat, everybody gets a seat, you can load up the grandparents and the dog and a cooler the size of a small casket and still not be crammed in. A Lowe LF 172 is plenty of boat for most families on most of the water around here. Want more room and more motor, the Viaggio X20C will do it. Which one barely matters. The easy boat is the one that actually gets used, and the fussy one looks real sharp parked in the yard, which is mostly where it’ll stay.
Because the whole payoff is stuff like the afternoon in July you can’t get the kids off the swim platform without bribing them with ice cream. Or the slow loop around the lake at dusk when nobody’s talking and you’d rather they didn’t. That’s what you were turning over in your head back in February under three feet of snow. There aren’t many of those in a Maine summer, and you know that now. So don’t let June get away with the boat still sitting on the trailer.
If the boat itself is the thing making every trip more work than it’s worth, come see us before the season’s gone. We’ve been getting Maine families on the water out of Livermore Falls since 1960, and we’ll help you sort out what fits.
