The Maiden Voyage

Posted on August 2, 2006 No Comments

We put the boat in our first Colorado lake today! I guess I can manage to do this without the father-in-law along to guide me. There were doubts… I didn’t grow up with boats, after all.

We went to Cherry Creek park which has a small’ish reservoir lake in it. About 12 miles from home and the lake is 880 surface acres. A little smaller than what we’re used to from “back home” but big enough to get a chance to see how the boat likes this altitude. It didn’t do too bad, but we’ll need to change the prop… the 4500′ altitude increase has changed my “flat-out across the lake” RPM (lower) so I need to change the prop pitch to compensate. Kind of like changing gears in a car, I suppose. I’m still figuring this all out, but I can tell it isn’t where it should be for the best performance.

We picked up my folks at their camp site (they’re in town for the week) and headed over to the boat ramp. Super nice boat ramp – very wide and gets deep fast. I managed to back the boat straight down the ramp even with my father watching (omg squee!) which is a pretty big deal (to me). We ran aimlessly around the lake for a bit and then settled down to a nice sedate tour along the shore lines. Very nice park and we had a very pleasant ride. It wasn’t a steamy day (a bit abnormal) so we didn’t do any tubing or skiing. Just tooled around. Capped off by an excellent steak dinner back at the campsite.

Getting the boat back into the garage was a challenge tonight. Last time, the folks across the street weren’t home so I basically popped into their driveway and backed almost straight into the garage. They were home tonight. Curses! And also had cars on the street. Ugh. So… it took an extra 10 or 15 minutes of backing and filling to get lined up and into the garage. But I did it. And my long time fear of backing up trailers is leaving me. And that too is a plus.

All in all, a very positive experience. Although I don’t think we’ll ever hit the local reservoirs on a weekend (holy crowds, batman!) heading out for an evening seems like something we definitely could do. Wasn’t too crowded and we had a good time.