I don’t understand the details behind your comment about needing to alter the prop to provide a pulling action rather than a pushing action of the motor. There is no difference in the orientation of the lower unit between pushing mode and pulling mode in regard to which way that lower unit moves through the water, and thus there is no difference in what kind of prop is used. The “nose” of the motor housing always leads the way and the prop is always at the rear. Thus, the prop is always pushing (relative to the motor housing), even if the motor is orientated on the boat in a way that you would call it “pulling”. I hope that made sense.

Every foot-control I’ve seen (which I admit hasn’t been a lot) allows you to clamp the motor shaft anywhere among the 360 degrees of possible positions, eliminating any difficulty with setting up the orientation of the motor. This will naturally be true for any method you devise for clamping the top portion of your foot-controlled motor.

Years ago I built a custom clamp for a foot-controlled motor so that it could clamp to a transom in the same way as a tiller motor would do. That sounds like a solution that would do the job for you, but the clamp would attach to the front in your case. If you can’t build such a clamp yourself, describe your needs to any local welding shop and they can build you one very easily. When I built mine, I actually used hardware from a store-bought transom clamp in order to provide a ready-made adjustment system for making sure the motor shaft was vertical, but you won’t need that if you just build the clamp to accommodate the geometry of your planned point of attachment (no switching the motor between different boats).

By the same token, you could do what I think ‘Rodwork’ was describing, and make a mount for a standard bow bracket which folds up to retract the motor from the water. I’ve had two different bow-mount motors on my ancient little fishing boat, and for both of them I had to add special hardware for building a “bridge” on which to mount the rear part of the folding bow bracket (there’s no “deck” to attach that bracket to on my boat). Again, your local welding shop or machine shop might be your best friend in coming up with a related idea for your boat.

Am I missing anything?

As to the idea of reversing battery polarity, that’s not such a good idea (assuming it can even be done on modern motors with electronic controls) because motor props are much less efficient when spinning in reverse. They have that unique shape that optimizes the natural “outward flinging” of the water along the blades, including that backward sweep relative to the direction of spin, for good reasons. Also, props for modern trolling motors are extremely weedless but they are the opposite of weedless if they spin backward! But as described above, there should be no need to reverse the direction of propeller rotation in the first place.

Mike W wrote:

Wasn’t sure if the rod holder was going to survive.

Where I fish for channel cats, fish of around 15 pounds are virtually an everyday thing, if they are biting, and fish approaching 20 pounds are not rare. I’ve had those same concerns with rod holders. For a couple of years now I’ve been setting the drag “a bit looser than it should be” while the rods are in the holders. First of all, that’s how I make sure my rod holders will not break off (they are pretty decent quality but they are not as robust as the holders that a lot of dedicated cat guys use). Second, during that time when it’s awkward to get a solid grip for “prying” on the rod handle so it’s free to slip out of the holder, I’m not struggling as much because there’s less tension on the line in the first place.

It only takes about one second to re-tighten the drag as soon as you have the rod in your hands, and the fish really doesn’t take out as much line as you might expect in the meantime. This is mainly a way to be ready for those larger fish – it won’t make any difference for most of them. I think you’ll find this a useful trick when using rod holders.

I still love the Johnson Silver Minnow. I realize there are newer copies of the lure that are probably better (even Joe Bucher is making one now), but as to the orginal, what other lure works so well in shallow weeds and only costs six bucks? Real pork rinds can’t be found now but I dress them with fake pork strips from a company called “Fat Cow”. Those strips work FAR better than twister grubs and are nearly as tough as original pork rinds. One thing to know is that Silver Minnows are made in China now and the quality control sucks. It’s often necessary to bend the hook outward so that the hook point is aimed in an effective direction instead of being re-curved back toward the body of the lure. If you miss hookups with this lure, that’s why. On that note, some days with pike, fish after fish will snap at the fake pork rind and get their teeth snagged and it seems like they are hooked but they get loose. Other days, fish after fish will inhale the thing. It seems all pike in the lake share the same mood on a given day, regarding exactly how they attack this particular lure.

Someone mentioned the Red-Eye Wiggler. Back in the early 70s the family of a buddy of mine had a cottage on a shallow weedy lake up north, and almost the only lure anyone on that lake used for when fishing for northerns was this one.

Also in the early 70s, I learned from a friend of my dad’s about a lure called the “Bass Charger”. It was hard plastic with a shape like that of the main part of a modern plastic frog, and had a pair of eyes to add to the froggy appearance. It had a single hook on each side attached at the back, mounted so they could pivot up and down a bit and with the hooks curving up and slightly outward. You’d attach a pork strip to a little screw head on the back of the lure and that strip would feed out through a slot at the back to trail out between the two hooks. It was supposed to be quite weedless but that aspect of the design could have been accomplished more effectively with a single hook mounted right on top of the body (the idea of their design was for the paired hooks to work even if fish struck only at the pork strip and not the entire lure). Anyway, they worked well, back in the days before the idea of the modern plastic frog took hold. I think they were made by a one-man shop in southeastern Wisconsin.

The River Runt has already been mentioned, and it was a favorite of my dad’s when he was very young (he’s 96 now), probably because they were super popular back then. I saw a guy on YouTube who made an episode on classic lures, and he was literally slaying the smallmouth bass in a tiny stream with a River Runt. And I saw Jeremy Wade catching fish on a River Runt in some exotic country during one of his “River Monsters” episodes! (I think he was catching bait or just doing a little casting for fun, but I can’t recall). I guess Mr. Wade is old enough to have used that lure in his youth and thus maybe he still had a few of them.

Regarding “Hellbender” being a cool name for a lure, many of you might know that that’s actually the name of an American species of salamander. I guess the folks at Whopper Stopper thought the name was cool also.

I agree with MX1825 about having the boat be nose-high for rainwater drainage, but I would make it sit more flush on those rear bunks to spread out the stress of supporting all that weight. Also, it’s best if the bunk extends all the way to the rear so there’s no “overhang” of the boat.

I didn’t quite figure out from the pictures how the bunks are arranged, but from the one picture it looks like there may be some curvature of the hull that will prevent you from getting the whole length of the bunks to sit flush against the hull. The photo might be deceptive but if that’s the case you might add and extra few layers of carpet at the free end of the bunk.

If moving one bunk mount or the other by “one set of holes” is too much of a change, you can elongate the appropriate set of holes with a rat-tail file for a more precise adjustment. With a nice sharp file, this should only take about five minutes per hole.

You mentioned changing the location of the front winch mount and roller to accommodate or to cause changes in boat tilt from front to rear, but if there’s a central roller located within the forward half of the boat, and it seems like there could be, you will need to deal with that as well. In any case, adjusting one point of support usually means re-adjusting all of the other ones too.

I wouldn’t mess with taking the boat to the launch to free up the support adjusters, if that was part of your reason for going there. In case you aren’t already doing this, it will be a simple matter to just jack the boat up from one rear corner at a time. Use a piece of 2×4 or 2×6 lumber to spread out the support area where the boat gets lifted. If you don’t have a jack that is suitable for this job, rent one. Your time and aggravation is worth that minor cost.

From a functionality and mechanical point of view, whether or not the trailer is perfectly level doesn’t matter. For example, if the hitch is a few inches higher or lower than the height that makes the trailer level, and you look at how much tilt that creates between the front and rear ends of your leaf springs, you’ll hardly see a difference, and it won’t affect how the springs function. How these same deviations away from level affect the forces of pulling and braking, as transmitted to the trailer, is rather complicated to calculate, but if you have experience with simple vector calculations you already will know that the changes will be minuscule and couldn’t possibly affect the handling or “feel” of the trailer at all.

On the other hand, one thing that can matter sometimes is the orientation of the boat itself, and that’s the only thing I would measure. If your boat sits in a nose-down position it will collect rainwater across all parts of the boat bottom which are lower than the drain plug at the back. Given the fact that the open top of your boat your boat provides a huge area for catching rain, this weight can add up in a hurry. Rain collected across that huge area then gets funneled to the lowest parts of the boat, so just consider this illustration: A four-inch depth of water over a rectangular area of the boat bottom that is only three feet by four feet weighs 250 pounds. Have your boat just a little bit nose-high on your trailer and you won’t have to worry about this, as long as you remember to open the drain plug. And if you forget to open the plug, at least you can just open it and be done with the problem instead of trying to remove the water some other way.

One thing no one has mentioned is your intention to get a motor with a short shaft. That choice may be fine, but let’s make sure.

Maybe you already know this, but a short-shaft motor is only for boats with short transoms. Standard transom height on a boat of that size will either be 15 inches or 20 inches (or some height that is really close to one of those two figures). The transom of your boat has no “cut-out” that’s lower where the motor is mounted. I can see that this boat does not have very high sides, but even low-sided boats commonly have a “cut-out” to lower the transom at the motor location when designed for short-shaft motors. Since there’s no way to determine scale in this photo, I can’t be sure what transom height you have.

If you have a 20-inch transom, you need a long-shaft motor. If you run a short-shaft motor on a boat with a 20-inch transom, the propeller will suck air like crazy at medium and higher power settings. But if the transom height is 15 inches, go ahead and use a short-shaft motor, and in fact, a short-shaft motor would be the best choice.

Transom height is measured 90 degrees to the bottom of the boat, rather than being measured along the slant of the transom, so it’s best to use a big carpenter’s square to make the measurement. Even without a carpenter’s square, you can eyeball your tape measure to orient it pretty close to 90 degrees compared to the bottom of the boat, and your measurement will be good enough.

To think that fixing this problem need not be expensive would be a fantasy, I’m sorry to say. I have no familiarity with wood basement walls, but if in fact it’s possible for such a wall design to function properly in the first place, the characteristics of your soils and drainage will still be a huge part of whether or not such a problem as yours becomes an issue.

Just to outline some general aspects to keep in mind, backfill alongside basement walls of residential structures is notoriously a problem because few residential builders know anything about soils, and because backfilling properly requires time and effort, which are two items that are in short supply when building houses. Poorly-compacted backfill has an amplified ability to take on water, and loose, saturated soils exert far more pressure against a wall than well-compacted soil for a number of reasons which I won’t try to describe here.

Now, again, not being familiar with this kind of basement wall, I won’t claim to know what needs to be done in your case, but going with the assumption that such a wall can, under ideal conditions, resist lateral earth pressure, I am thinking that a proper repair will likely require that something be done to reduce that pressure.

Standard ways of accomplishing this involve the use of free-draining material as backfill. This would be a clean sand or clean sand-and-gravel (which I won’t define right now, but which an expert in soils can help you with). Compacting that soil to an adequate degree is important (but doing this without over-stressing what seems to be a very weak wall to begin with), and there should be a provision for providing active removal of water that accumulates at the bottom of the backfill (typically this would be a standard drain-and-sump system).

You can probably visualize that replacing backfill with a material that exerts less lateral pressure is going to be expensive no matter who does it. The backfill will need to be removed in any case, just to push the bow out of the wall.

With backfill and drainage issues solved, you can virtually eliminate water entry into the backfill by diverting roof water well away from the house, providing an effective slope of the ground surface away from the basement walls, and even waterproofing the ground surface. A good way to waterproof the surface is to mix powdered bentonite into layer of soil that’s a few inches thick, at some minor depth below the ground surface so that you can still have a topsoil for turf or garden. Lots of residential structures have improperly-sloped grades adjacent to them, and depending how badly the contractor screwed up the overall site grading, fixing this can involve a lot more than just adding material next to the structure. Waterproofing the soil surface can be done yourself, with a rototiller and some elbow grease (but this is only after you’ve hired someone to identify and solve whatever the other issues are). Very few earthwork contractors will have any experience waterproofing the soil surface and you’d be lucky to find one who even knows this is “a thing”. I can no longer remember the proper ratio of powdered bentonite to soil, but an experienced geotechnical engineer will know this, or be able to look it up.

So for starters, it would be best to hire a geotechnical engineering firm. That sounds like it will be expensive but it will actually be the cheapest part of the entire operation, by far, and it may even save you from wasting money on the wrong solution performed by some guy who thinks he understands the whole problem but due to Dunning-Kruger, does not. This might even be worth the attention of a structural engineer too, though if these wooden walls are common in your neck of the woods, it may be that some local building contractors already have experience with any structural fixes that are known to work.

It may turn out that reinforcing the wall in its currently deformed condition would be a suitable plan of action, but again, you need to get some experts involved just to figure this out.

I’m kind of a newbie here. I would have a hard time knowing what most of my PBs are, since I’m not the hard-core and successful kind of angler that many folks here are, and for those same reasons, most of my PBs are not too special. However, I do enjoy going after channel catfish and I know what my personal best was for that species. And I even have a picture of it. It was 36 inches and about 24.5 pounds (I didn’t get an exact weight because I was trying to stand up while using the scale to hold up the fish inside the landing net, in a tiny boat in choppy conditions, but it definitely was between 24 and 25 pounds). I caught this in October of 2022 while targeting northern pike. At first I thought I had a PB northern pike, but when it became clear that the fish wasn’t going to get tired for a REALLY long time, I knew it must be a catfish.

Funny thing, I’ve caught about four other channel cats of this same length, but all of them were a bit under 20 pounds. This guy was a brute, and the hardest puller of them all too.

Also, I released this fish.

Attachments:

1. 

   IMG_1222.jpg
   

Skunks are indeed mellow. They have the self-confidence that allows them to be that way.

I take walks at night in the neighborhood and in some years I often see skunks. None of them were ever worried by me, and I was not worried by any of them. One night after a very brisk walk, I got home and walked very briskly up my driveway. There’s a detached garage at the end of the driveway, just beyond the spot were I needed to make a sharp turn to the left onto the back sidewalk that leads to my back door. Just as I made that left turn, I saw a skunk on the sidewalk coming the opposite way. We were both within 5 feet of each other by the time each of us knew the other was there. We both made the same reflexive decision – to simply go faster and pass quickly. We passed going opposite directions with less than two feet of clearance between us. I trotted to my back stoop and the skunk apparently scampered across my driveway. I stopped and turned to look at him from my back stoop and he stopped and turned to look at me from the other side of the driveway. I think that both of us said to ourselves, “whew, that was close!”

There’re some interesting new stories here. Since it seems I revived this thread the other day, I’ll pass along two stories that are second-hand, but interesting. I heard both of them from an old friend of mine that I used to work with. For all I know, he might even be a lurker on this site.

The first story is much like that told by “The Famous Grouse” above. This friend of mine was fishing with another guy on a small dammed-up lake surrounded by forest. They were catching bluegills, and as they moved their boat along the shore, a great-horned owl kept flying from tree to tree, staying near them and watching the whole time. They tossed back an undersized bluegill which had been deeply hooked and probably was not going to survive. The fish sat there just barely in contact with the surface, not moving, and the owl sprang into action. It swooped down and plucked the fish from the water, flying right underneath one guy’s fishing rod in the process. That owl had learned that fishermen sometimes tossed out injured fish and was waiting for just that opportunity.

****

This same friend of mine was ice fishing on the backwater sloughs of a large river, fishing for northerns using tip-ups, using large minnows for bait. There was ice where they were fishing, but not far away was a large expanse of open water. An otter showed up, swimming around out there in the open water, diving below the surface and coming up again, and sometimes coming up onto the ice and then going back into the water again. At one point, it was swimming straight toward them, and also toward one of the tip-ups, and it dove when it reached the ice, but presumably kept swimming in the same direction. One of the guys said, “Ha, what if he takes the bait at that tip-up.” Just then, the flag went up and everyone in the group said something like ‘oh crap’. They all rushed to the tip-up and saw that the line was peeling off the spool much, much faster than they had ever seen in their lives. They didn’t know whether to grab the line and try to pull the bait out of the otter’s mouth or let it keep going. They didn’t want to hook the otter.

Then the otter popped out of the water at the edge of the ice, and climbed up on the ice with the bait crosswise in his mouth and the tip-up line trailing behind. The otter looked at the fishermen, and dropped the fish. As my friend described it to me, it was as if the otter spat it out, like, “phew”. Everyone gave a sigh of relief that they hadn’t ended up hooking the critter.

Once again, being new here, I haven’t figured out how to do a direct reply. This is to Tom P.

The idea that snakes are “aggressive” comes from misunderstanding how they behave, and not knowing that their behavior is entirely pre-programmed within their little pea brains. Instinct.

Snakes that try to climb into a boat have ZERO interest in you, and in fact, they have no idea that some large living critter is in the boat at all. Their instincts program them to seek out objects that are out in the open, away from the woods, etc., at those times when they are looking to soak up the heat of the sun, or to use the sunshine to help keep skin parasites or skin diseases in check. If you find a place where snakes do what you described, you could just as well anchor an empty boat there to determine what is happening. The snakes would do exactly the same thing with an empty boat. They are NOT approaching your boat to interact with you personally.

I’m just a guy who tries to help now and then when it comes to folks who misunderstand (and usually fear) snakes.

“The weird thing was that the fish house was at least three hunded yards from the shore. I guess muskrats can hold their breath for awhile!”

Okay, I guess I can’t figure out how to do an individual reply just yet, but this is a reply to the post by “mile832”.

I have a very old book (~1940) about general outdoor skills which has a little chapter on muskrats. The book says that muskrats make long crossings under the ice by “refreshing” their air supply along the way. Apparently they will exhale under the ice and then wait for a while while carbon dioxide dissolves into the water and some amount of oxygen that is dissolved in the water enters the bubble. Then the muskrat puts his nose up against the ice and inhales all the air that he can re-collect. This is not as good as getting a fresh breath of air but it greatly extends the distance under the ice that he can travel.

I can’t promise that this accounting of muskrat know-how is true, but the info did come from a trained naturalist who had studied muskrats more than most of us ever will. It’s worth mentioning that this same principle allows aquatic insects and spiders to remain submerged for far longer than the volume of their air supply “should” make possible, due to the bubble acting as a physical gill which gives off carbon dioxide to the water, and takes in oxygen from the water too (with the process being driven by a concentration gradient). With insects and spiders, they cannot remain submerged indefinitely by this method because nitrogen in their air-supply bubble gradually dissolves into the water and the bubble becomes smaller and smaller. For the muskrat, the same might occur if they COULD stay under the ice that long, but I think the bigger problem during the minutes that it takes for them to make a long crossing, would be re-capturing all the air they exhale. I’m sure they end up with less air in their lungs after doing this procedure even a single time, let alone over and over.

I just found this site a few weeks ago, and I was perusing threads. There are some good stories here and I thought I’d chip in and add some of my own, even though this discussion has been idle a long time. This will be a long post since I’ll list a few neat encounters.

Besides being a fisherman (with a very small motor boat), I do a lot of paddling in a solo canoe (so much paddling that I have three different solo canoes for different types of conditions). When returning from a trip on a small river at dusk or after dark, I cannot begin to count the number of beavers that have tail-slapped within 3 to 5 feet of the canoe. Sometimes I’ll toy with them and try to predict where they will surface, or once they surface I’ll coast straight at them without making a sound and they don’t even know I’m coming. I’ve nearly collided with a few, and it’s sort of “payback” for me to scare the crap out of a big ol’ bull beaver to make up for the ones that have startled me.

Once in early-early spring I was on a local, shallow river with a solo canoe. It was dusk, it was getting super cold, and I was in a hurry to get back to the landing. I saw lots of muskrats around, foraging for whatever still-edible vegetation they could scrounge from the bottom at that time of year. I didn’t pay them much mind until one of them popped to the surface just one foot from the canoe as I was rapidly cruising by. Now, that has happened to me a couple other times, and in each case, the muskrat simply had a startle response and crash-dived. Not THIS particular muskrat. In the blink of an eye after he broke the surface, he launched himself upward without even pausing, “leaping” out of the water high enough that three-quarters of his body length was in the air, with his head aimed right at me and his teeth bared, and in that instant he screamed at me. It was over and he was gone before I could even process what had happened, and I’ve never been so scared by a muskrat in my life. I could have touched him with my hand if I had been ready (not that I would have), he was so close. It happened way too fast for me to reason things out and realize that this was just a threat display. MAJOR startle factor for me when this happened.

I see that one guy here listed a number of dry-land encounters with snakes, so I’d love to describe my favorite dry-land encounter with an animal. I was on a solo road trip in northern Wisconsin, and I saw an old truck parked in a clearing that was of particular interest to me on account of my lifelong interest in such things, so I stopped to do some harmless trespassing and have a look at it. When I was by the truck, I saw a snowshoe hare leap into the air from behind a pallet load of bricks that was nearby. The hare hit the ground running and was gone in two seconds. Then, appearing right behind it was a very big fisher! Wow, so cool. I watched the fisher rapidly bird-dogging back and forth, looking for some sign of the hare, but it was too late for him to ever see it again. The fisher figured this out and headed off, loping the way they do, never having seen me, but I saw which way it went which was toward a nearby cluster of trees so I dashed 30 yards into a little clearing that was right by those trees, planning to get ahead of him. I got there and stood perfectly still and made squeaking sounds with my lips, and a few seconds later the fisher was running full speed in a perfectly straight line straight at me! I remained perfectly still and the fisher froze like a statue just 12 feet from me, looking up at me, and I swear he had an “oh poop!” expression on his face (ah, I see this site edits mild cuss words). Then he took off at a right angle, then veered toward the highway. I lost sight of him in some brush and weeds but I could see the part of the highway that he had been heading for. At that moment I could hear a redneck pickup truck (with roaring mudder tires) and the timing all seemed perfect for the fisher to intersect with the truck and possibly get clobbered, and I was really worried for him thinking it might be careless during its hasty get-away from me. Well, the truck kept coming and I saw no fisher. Then the truck went by and I saw no fisher. Once the truck was gone, THEN the fisher dashed across the highway. Smart animal – it had waited for the truck to go by before crossing!

One time I was canoeing with a group of folks in Missouri, and for a while I paddled all by myself. I saw a mink come out of the water with a big crayfish. I side-slipped the canoe right up next to him and he ate the crayfish with me sitting just five feet away. This was a “touristy” river and the mink was clearly accustomed to seeing people in canoes, so maybe this encounter doesn’t count, but it was neat to see a mink doing something that one does not see every day, and to see it for an extended time like that.

Which reminds me of the time I was solo canoeing a very small, tree-tangled creek. I was heading upstream and I had seen a really big wake zip ahead of me. I figured it was a carp but I had never seen carp like that in this creek. A short while later, I was threading my way through fallen trees, and up ahead about 40 feet, there was an otter, perched over the water on a slanting willow trunk, eating a fish. It ate the fish tail first, just like the nature books say that they do, devouring every scrap, though I couldn’t tell if it ate the head. I’m pretty sure that the wake I had seen moments earlier was that same otter, under the water and dashing ahead of my canoe, either getting away from me or pursuing prey.

One time I was fishing a backwater of a large river, on the back side of an island where the water level was raised by a series of beaver dams (dams functioning in both directions, since this backwater was fed by a tributary creek). I couldn’t bring myself to leave when the sun went down and I kept fishing well past dark. At one point, I was reeling a Jitterbug (surface lure) back to the canoe and a fish struck at the lure but missed, as commonly happens at night. I retrieved the lure closer, hoping the fish would follow and strike again. The fish DID follow, and it DID strike again, but not in the way I hoped. The fish apparently got a glimpse of the spot where the surface of the water was “broken” by the bow of my canoe, thought “Ah-ha, there it is!”, and charged. BANG! As I sat there pondering what had just happened, my canoe slowly pivoted in place from that sideways impact directed smack into the point of the bow, and the boat eventually rotated in place almost 90 degrees. That poor fish, probably a bass, must have had a headache and a banged-up jaw from that mistake.

Twice when canoeing a shallow, weedy river at night, I’ve had small bass leap from the water and land in the boat. When they suddenly realize there’s a big moving shape right next to them, they’ll assume it’s a giant predator and leap from the water, which is how two of them so far have ended up in the boat. And more times than I can count, in that same river, my canoe has been rammed by big carp swimming at high speed. Often I can see a fin or a mouth breaking the surface and I’ll aim for that as I cruise along. The canoe is so quiet that the carp will almost never know it’s there until it’s right on top of them. That particular fish will bolt, and often the shock wave they create will startle one or two other carp nearby to do the same, and if they happen to flee in the wrong direction, they sometimes crash smack into the canoe, though it’s only a glancing blow since the canoe only draws 3 inches of water or so (not like that poor bass that targeted the bow and struck it intentionally).

Many years ago I was in a tiny rowboat (similar to a canoe) on the same, shallow river. The rowboat is also dead-quiet. It was a mirror-calm night, and as I was briskly cruising along, I noticed that the boat sliced through a band of tiny ripples, then was back into mirror-calm water again. Something was out there swimming! I quietly circled back, turned on a little light and scanned the water in the direction from which those ripples had come, and one eye shone back at me, then two eyes as the animal turned to look at me. I rushed over to the animal, and it was a young raccoon. The raccoon was pretty smart because even as I pulled right up alongside him and kept pace with him, he didn’t veer off course, but stayed right there. I think he knew that escape was impossible so that the only thing that made sense was to keep swimming directly to the shore and hope I didn’t hurt him. There was nothing to be gained by terrorizing the little guy, so after cruising right alongside him for about ten seconds, I veered off his course, coasted a bit, and let him continue on his way. The river was at least 500 feet wide at this spot but apparently that didn’t stop him from deciding to cross. This was in September or October, and being a young coon, he was only very recently off on his own.

And finally, one more animal-in-the-water story. Ages ago I took that same little rowboat way up the river, right after ice out, up into the higher section that’s just a little creek. On the way back down, I saw a meadow vole swimming across the creek. I’ve read that they are very comfortable being semi-aquatic, but I didn’t expect what was coming. Just playing a silly game, I cut in front of the little guy, putting my boat between him and the shore that he was heading for. Unfazed, he swam right up to the boat and when he got there, he simply dove under water and swam beneath it, popping up on the other side and heading into the grass. Smart little guy. Again, something neat that you don’t see every day.