A little reminiscing

If you have the time you can click a pic, if you don't have the time, you should consider becoming a full-timer.

Rental boats at the Elephant Butte marina.

I ended up not going anywhere today, but I think I'll do some running around on Sunday. I'll probably be leaving here early next week, so I need to fill my fuel tank, refill a propane tank, and maybe buy a few groceries before I hit the road.

I should've done some of that early this morning, but I'm lazy, and being lazy makes me not want to do much of anything I need to do. And I procrastinate, putting off everything until tomorrow, and as you know tomorrow never comes. As a full-timer, those character traits are usually no problem, but in a State Park, things start getting busy on Friday after lunch, and it doesn't calm down until Sunday after lunch.

Tomorrow I want to walk down to the boat launch ramp,  maybe over to the marina, and watch the folks launching their boats early in the morning. Watching folks launch their boats brings back some happy memories of me being a teenager in the early 1960s, living in Miami, and riding my Cushman Eagle scooter  to Biscayne Bay at a place called Snapper Point, that consisted of a small boat launch ramp, and tiny bait and tackle store that got real busy on a Saturday morning.

I found it fun to watch all the fishermen hurrying to launch their boats and get out on Biscayne Bay before the tide changed. Of course, there would be many arguments, people yelling at each other, and usually at the folks that had trouble backing up a boat trailer; I can definitely relate to that. And the selfish idiots that would block up the boat ramp with their boat while they walked over to the store to buy some ballyhoo for sailfish bait.

Or I would get on my scooter and putt over to Homestead Bayfront Park and do the same thing. Homestead Bayfront Park in those days was much nicer than Snapper Point, which was nothing more than a ramshackle bait store and a boat launch ramp only big enough for two boats at the same time. Homestead Bayfront Park had a swimming beach, concession stand, small marina, and it was a place where families would go on the weekend to have a barbecue and watch the kids swim.

Homestead Bayfront Park was also a handy boat lunch site to get over to the Keys. You could motor across Biscayne Bay to Elliott Key for some good fishing, or go through a channel and out into the ocean, where it was only a few miles to the coral reefs and the best skin-diving and fishing in the entire country, which is what the Florida Keys are famous for.

I considered doing things like that as a morning of free entertainment, which was pretty important to a 16-year-old kid living on Homestead Air Force Base in base housing. Who didn't have enough money to go to the Base movie theater even though the price of admission was only 25 cents... It was only that cheap because the Air Force knew that GIs and their families didn't have enough money to pay regular theater prices.

Little did I know that the very same year, my financial problems would be over when I walked into the Pine Ridge boarding stables and qualified for the coveted position of Equine Sanitation Engineer.....After that life-changing event my teenage years never smelled the same.

Theboondork

Its not a pontoon houseboat, it looks like a houseboat built on a regular boat. Houseboats are very popular here, although I've never figured out exactly what they're good for.

They draw too much water to get in the shallows so they're not a very good fishing boat. There usually too slow for water skiing, although these new houseboats with hundreds of horsepower motors on them are fast enough. And there not much good for going very far because the amount of fuel they burn in an hour is usually horrendous.

So its use pretty much depends on your age, if you're young, you load it up with hotdogs, a keg of beer, and invite your friends to a party. And if you're old, you sit out in the middle of the lake in a lounge chair, and toss rocks at passing jet skis.... "GET OFF MY LAKE YOU GOLDURNED YOUNG WHIPPERSNAPPERS !! " 

Sunrise at the Elephant Butte marina.

Young folks out for a day of boating on the Lake.

This looks like the kind of houseboat you could actually water-ski behind. I don't know how much horsepower that motor has but I would guess a couple hundred at least. He's also got a nice float-on boat trailer which has got to be the easiest way of loading and offloading a boat. I don't remember float on boat trailers being around when I was living in Miami and had boats, the old-fashioned winch-on boat trailers were terrible, a lot of work and at least a little bit dangerous, unless the boat launch ramp was perfect.