One final road trip tugging the boat along

Nearly every March for more than 20 years my wife, Barb, and I towed a boat cross country to go fishing.

It was always an adventure. We were caught in a snowstorm on Lake Powell, got lost on the Gulf Coast, and were nearly swamped by the wake of a passing ship on the Atlantic Ocean.

We’ve driven through South Dakota blizzards, burned out wheel bearings on the boat trailer in the middle of nowhere, and been sidetracked by flat tires in backwoods Mississippi.

Along the way we caught redfish, bluefish, sea trout and sharks, saw some great places, (Chokoloskee and Appalachicola come immediately to mind) and met some real characters.

But we won’t be doing it again.

After years of trailering a boat to water and tying up at somebody else’s dock, we finally have a dock of our own.

All those miles we traveled and all that exotic water we saw simply reinforced what we knew all along – we wanted to a place on the water in Montana. So when the opportunity to buy a cabin on Fort Peck presented itself, we jumped on it.

At the time we didn’t know the purchase meant trailer-boating road trips would forever be in the rearview mirror. However, it didn’t take long.

That realization came with a bit of relief. It means we’ll no longer have to pull a boat through rush hour traffic in Atlanta. I won’t have to chip ice off the boat trailer so the taillights will be visible. And we’ll no longer have to avoid Waffle House because the parking lots are too small.

Instead, we’re taking a final road trip south unencumbered by a boat trailer. We’ll visit family and friends, take stock of America, and eat breakfast at Waf-fle House.

We’re hoping when we get back to Montana the ice will be gone and it will be time to put the boats in the water. The ramp is only a mile from the cabin and I don’t expect to trailer the boats again except a couple of times a year on that short stretch of gravel.

It took thousands of miles of trailering to find a home for our boats. I should have known we’d eventually find it in our backyard.

Parker Heinlein is at

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