Flaming Motors & the Fourth of July

I haven't had much time to sit down and type lately. I hope everyone had a happy, safe, and commemorative Fourth of July.

My Fourth didn't include fireworks but rather a motor on fire. Everyone's safe, no worries, but it was a little scary (and a lot of funny). We went over to my manfriend's pa's place for a BBQ and some river time. His backyard is literally on the Mississippi River so after we ate we decided to take the boat out. That's great and all but if you've got a seriously malfunctioning boat, a river isn't exactly where you want to be.

I'm Ms. Safety. Not kidding. I know life's short and unexpected things have a tendency happen so I like to take all the precautions I can…usually. Not this time, go figure. Before we even left, we figured out there weren't any life jackets and only one floatation device on the boat. By law, you're supposed to have one of each for everyone. Or something like that anyways. We decided we'd go anyhow. The public dock is a mile and a half to two miles down from his house. We "drove" (on the boat) from the dock down to his house so we could wave to his wife. This woman is brilliant for staying home instead of joining us. Mind you now, this boat supposedly has a "new" engine. Apparently, "new" to my boyfriend's pa is actually a re-built engine. The darn thing decides it's gonna overheat. Yes, a boat, in the water, overheating. Not gonna get into all the technical jumble about how that's even possible but, believe me, it is. Obviously, cause it happened to us. So we shut it off for a few, the fellas tinker with it a bit and turn it back on. At this point we decide, maybe we should go back. Just in case. After floating further down the river, because rivers flow, y'know, we finally start heading back up towards the dock.

What's this? A fire? REALLY!? You've got to be kidding me. One of the wonderful things about Minnesota is that people are super friendly. Some young folks ride up and ask if everything's all right. Other than our motor being toast, yes, everything's fine. And thank goodness for that freakin' fire extinguisher on board, right? At least we brought that! Now we all know the main reason boats have to have those. Had we actually been in serious trouble though, it's so nice to know that people will actually stop out here for you (unlike some states). Real quick here, that cooling problem I mentioned earlier, it also cools the electrical system. So, apparently, if you've got some cooling problems on this stupid motor, you better hope it's not the system cooling the electrical system, otherwise you're about to have yourself a nice little fire. I hope you brought something to cook over it! Of course, we had to turn the motor off when it caught fire so now we're back down the river, almost where we turned it off the first time. Turns out, not only does the motor like to catch fire, the anchor is to weak to hold the boat, and the backup propeller motor thing is a) not turning on, and b) probably not even powerful enough to move us against the river.

After we put the fire out we start heading towards the dock (again). Being in water, it's easy to reach your hand over and throw water on-board, so that was the job the rest of the drive back to the dock. Throw water on the engine so it doesn't turn into a huge ball of fire. Weee…we made it back and encountered a few other problems loading the boat on the trailer which, I have to say, were simply a few people's lack of common sense. But that's another story for another time that I'll probably never write about just because the fire steals all the glory in the story. That's my Fourth in a nutshell. I hope everyone else's Fourth was a lot safer and enjoyable than ours. We got out alive, and that's the important thing. Now, I just laugh. I mean seriously, how is this story not absolutely hilarious?