There are all sorts of boating weekends, of course. Sometimes you leave the dock, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you cook a meal or two onboard, sometimes you don’t.
My favorite weekend, I guess–and maybe this is because I’ve enjoyed my fair share of weeks-long passages where all you mostly see is water–is a weekend where you sleep onboard at the marina on Friday evening (thereby nixing having to wake up periodically throughout the night to check the anchor) and take “a little boat ride,” as they say, on Saturday after sleeping a tad late.
Then you come back to the marina late in the afternoon, maybe wash down the boat (or wait until Sunday morning), get duded up a bit, and go out to a favorite restaurant Saturday evening, maybe see a movie, and come back to the marina and the boat (often via moonlight) for a long, water-lapping snooze. Sunday, you gotta go home, of course, which is tragic. I mean, truly tragic.
But remember this. Don’t let the gloom of your departure cause you to lose focus Sunday afternoon and, say, forget to nix the breaker on your freshwater pump before hitting the trail (I failed to do this once, a happening that unserendipitously coincided with Betty‘s freshwater system springing a leak, an unholy synergy that eventually dumped the freshwater tank’s contents into the bilge, discharged the works overboard via the bilge pump, and finally fried the freshwater pump to a crisp even though it was of the supposed run-dry variety, more’s the pity). And also remember to close all the windows or ports (except maybe the one in the head), close all the seacocks, and heavens to Betty! Make sure to complete one final, all-important task. Check out the video here to see what it might be.
