Boat trip to Ft Myers

Dad had his boat up in Tampa for several months at a Marina on the west side of the bay and needed to get it back to Ft Myers. When he brought it up, he had a guy trailer it up for a few hundred bucks. And when it came time to take it back he called the guy up and the guy did not want any part of it. I am guessing it was because the price of gas had shot up and there was no way the guy could make money on what he charged before so with just a little convincing, dad decided to drive it down.

Steve Hagen just so happened to be in town that weekend so the three of us got to go on a nice 3 hour boat trip and the weather could not have been better. I took that Friday off work but still had to get up early because dad wanted to get an early start. When we pushed off it was probably 8:30-9AM and the water was like glass.

I had just gotten dad a new computer monitoring device for his motors so this was the perfect time to figure out what his motors doing. I got it hooked up to one of the motors early on mainly so I could monitor the fuel consumption. At one point dad opened it up and maxed it out at probably 75MPH. went back to check just what he was burning and when I told him he pulled the RPM’s back a little and then a little more and finally said, I think we can cruise the rest of the way at 50MPH since at that speed it burnt half as much fuel. It was just funny to see him do the calculation in his head of what both motors were burning up.

All in all, we burnt in fuel just $50 more in fuel than what he paid to have it shipped, which was a damn good deal since we had a nice time on the way down too. I could not even tell you what the hell we talked about the whole time, but I know it is times like those that I will really miss. The just hanging out for no reason at all.

Shawn