I had so much water in my boat she wouldn’t get on plane. It was 5 inches up on my floor when I got to the dock. My floor is a good 10 inches above the bottom of the boat, so that’s alot of water. It drained through the drain hole and pumped with the bildge for almost a full 6 minutes before it was empty.
And Mason raining in at 6ft2 210 pounds would definitely have to hold my ankles lol he also has to get things from the top of the cupboards and closets for me these days 
son is 6 feet plus tall, he’s does that for me too!!!
I’m with Hunting Dave. Can’t tell you how many times those AIS guys goof you up if you wait for them to see your plug out they ask something and you forget. Put the plug in right away Barney Fife comes over yelling citizens arrest! Drives me nuts!
I remember one time a couple years ago on Mille Lacs, had my buddy (who doesn’t fish much) and his wife up for a fall smallmouth trip. My buddy backs me in at Mac’s, and his wife hooks the winch and chain from the tongue (she’s a trooper). I go to reverse off the trailer, and the boat doesn’t move. I reverse harder, and nothing. At this point I remember thinking to myself “I remember taking the one transom strap off, then I had to run up to help them with the boat cover…I must have taken the other strap off too, right??” Well, turns out I didn’t! But throttling it up in reverse did have the fun effect of tugging out 2-3′ of transom strap from the retractable base, which along with my buddy backing me in further (he thought I was just too shallow), left me with a trailer hooked up to the back of my boat, floating about 2′ under me in 4′ of water! Of course trying to pull the trailer far enough forward to get it back on solid ground, along with trying to keep the boat relatively centered on it went about as well as you’d expect. Long story short, I wound up reaching back with a fillet knife and cutting the strap. $50 for the strap was the easy part of the lesson, the hard part was looking like such a dumb@ss in front of my friends!
IMO if you have a kid who wants to help and you say “sorry I have a routine, step aside,” you are missing a great opportunity for your kid to grow and feel a sense of responsibility and ownership of the process. Someday he is gonna be doing this himself and unlike me he will be able to look back at lessons learned from dad. Same with bearcats kid. Although, with a plug it doesn’t hurt to double check his work.
Much worse than the drain plug snafu is the winch strap snafu with a roller trailer — and I once did both in one trip. My boat was standing up on the skeg with the bow way up. I got 2 really nice big dudes to lift from the bottom of the transom while I cranked like hell and slowly got it to level out and roll back on the trailer. Then was so flustered I forgot the plug before launching. At that point I called it a night, loaded up, drove home and punished myself with wetvac duty.
IMO if you have a kid who wants to help and you say “sorry I have a routine, step aside,” you are missing a great opportunity for your kid to grow and feel a sense of responsibility and ownership of the process. Someday he is gonna be doing this himself and unlike me he will be able to look back at lessons learned from dad. Same with bearcats kid. Although, with a plug it doesn’t hurt to double check his work.
Much worse than the drain plug snafu is the winch strap snafu with a roller trailer — and I once did both in one trip. My boat was standing up on the skeg with the bow way up. I got 2 really nice big dudes to lift from the bottom of the transom while I cranked like hell and slowly got it to level out and roll back on the trailer. Then was so flustered I forgot the plug before launching. At that point I called it a night, loaded up, drove home and punished myself with wetvac duty.
I always have him help with everything from backing me in to prepping the boat. We have launched about 12 times since and I can tell you he hasn’t missed the plug again. He just turned 13 so teaching him everything is my goal. He can also park my long truck and trailer pretty good unless the parking lot is packed. I do however make sure I double triple check behind him. I would ever turn him down helping me because I have a routine. That teaches him nothing.
I’ve done that!
No automatic bilge pump!
Got her up on plane, ran towards the dock with manual bilge pump running!
Docked and waded behind to insert plug.
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