08.26.04 - I have an old 280-Z that runs best when I don't ignore it, so that was my back-up excuse when I told Suzy I was going to take a run down to the marina, and asked, in the very same breath, if there was anything she needed in town. "What marina?" she asked, looking up from her computer.

Even our friends tell us that we really don't get out nearly as much as we ought to, and up until now, we've never been big "boat" people, so I couldn't fault her for not remembering that Roosevelt Lake was only an hour away, but I did have to spend a little time soothing ruffled feathers. Now that I had told her what I had planned for the day, she wanted to go along, but had an appointment she couldn't get out of. I promised her "next time" and asked again, on my way out the door, if there was anything we needed for dinner. It was hard to tell exactly what she replied, but we were either going to have an awfully early Thanksgiving dinner, or she was really ticked off… I didn't stop to inquire.

The car ran great. At 28 years old, it barely shows it's 180,000 miles, every one of which I'm responsible for, except for the three or four they put on it getting from the boat in Long Beach, California to the dealer in West Covina, where Ted Block sold me my very first new car. As I left the four-lane at Highway 188, twenty miles south of Payson, and began the winding decent to the lake, bone-dry, 90-degree desert air whistled overhead, past the open moon roof, helping to draw in crisp refrigeration through the dash vents and across my grinning face.

When full, Roosevelt Lake is 24 miles long and occupies over 22,000 acres behind an immense 280-foot high concrete and steel dam at the southernmost rim of the Great Tonto Basin. Visually, the lake can be spectacular, it's mineral-blue waters framed starkly beneath the cobalt sky by the incredibly rugged Mazatzal and Sierra Ancha mountain ranges, dotted by tens of thousands of giant, marching Saguaro cacti.

The marina is more than adequate for a lake in the middle of Arizona's Great Sonoran Desert. Besides what I estimated to be about 300 wet slips, ranging from 30 to 75', both covered and uncovered, there's a five-acre boat yard that, although pretty dusty on a breezy day, offers rates comparable to Allen the Auto & RV Czar back up the road in Payson where I'm paid up through April 15th of 2005. The marina store, which functions as the Harbor Master's office, Burger Joint & Bait Shop, is about a half-mile inland from the nearest slip, and up one of the longest floating concrete piers I've ever seen. Friendly little jitneys run back and forth every few minutes, and I even saw them running between the store and the boat yard in the distance, yet another quarter-mile or so removed from the lake. Space is not a problem here, and room for growth they've got!

I spent most of the rest of the day walking through the boat yard and along the finger slips looking at standing and running rigging. I'm not sure what I was looking for, other than a stepped Reinell 22, but whatever it was, I didn't find it. What I did find is that every single boat, even those of the same make, size and apparent age, has its own unique configuration, either by design or as modified by its master. Although almost all were rigged similarly in a general sense, none were similar enough to be called the same. With my pocket-sized digital Sony, I took high-resolution, clandestine photos of other people's rigging, their home-made trailer tongue extensions, their port and windshield (dodger?) applications, and even some bow lights ("MoonTan's" has a pale pink lens on the port side and nothing to starboard). I even took a mental inventory of the range of horsepower ratings of the numerous outboards hanging on transoms everywhere. All the while, I kept wondering what it would take, in this new world of color-coded alerts, to bring security swooping in on me, but whatever heinous act it is that triggers Code Red, I failed to commit it, and I left the marina unmolested with a camera full of fascinating but irrelevant boom vangs and a head more full of questions than it was when I arrived.

As I was passing through Payson on my return northbound, I stopped briefly by the boat to drop off a spare ¼-wave VHF whip I had dug out for the eventual ship's radio, and to take a picture of "MoonTan's" stern navigation light. It matched the masthead light with a missing lens and I wanted an intact example of what I was looking for the next time I was browsing around eBay. I wanted to make it fast because it was late afternoon and the sky was dark, heavy with monsoon-laden clouds. I felt the first sprinkles as I climbed up into the cockpit. With an ear-splitting clap of thunder that drowned out the whirring tick of the digital's shutter, the rain started coming down in torrents. Rather than jump overboard and run back to the car through the deluge, I slid open the companionway hatch and quickly went below, closing the hatch behind me against the now hammering rainfall.

All in all, I was probably in the cabin ten minutes, but it seemed longer. As are most such seasonal storms, the downpours or "micro-bursts" are fierce but short-lived, without much surface wind being associated with them. Inside, it was dark and close and smelled of damp and vaguely lemon-scented bleach. Having stripped just about everything from the interior, I sat on the floor of the settee area, wiping the raindrops from my Sony DSP and leaning back against the vertical chrome tube that would some day support the table top I was yet to build.

I was surprised at the loudness of the rain pounding on the deck just above my head, and wondered briefly if I had left my widow down in the Durango. Very little light was coming through the dark-tinted Plexiglas ports. Very little light, but quite a bit of water. A pool was beginning to form in the otherwise empty battery well to my right, fed by a widening torrent tumbling down the inside of the hull from the badly decomposed weather-stripping at the aft end of the portside window.

The rain was slamming relentlessly down onto the Reinell's tapered deck and running in waves, no doubt, over the side, catching on the top of the window's exterior weather-stripping and following it aft on its way to the ground. Much of it, however, was actually being diverted into the boat through a gaping hole smeared over with at least two different colored but equally futile and ancient applications of purely cosmetic silicone sealer. Marveling at the vigor and sheer ingenuity of unchecked water, as I'm sure Lewis often did with Clark, I was again surprised, this time by the wetness I began to feel beneath my left thigh. I looked down to see another substantial stream of rainwater running down onto the settee floor from the forward end of that same poorly-set window.

Worrying, now, that I couldn't even really remember closing the door on the Durango, I moved carefully forward on the now slippery floor into the V-berth and turned to sit, looking back toward a darkened, leaky galley. My left flip-flop-clad foot announced the discovery of another pool of water collecting just aft of the V-berth on the starboard side in the space formerly occupied by the fractured Handihead that I had removed. Glancing up, I saw that I had neglected to plug the through-deck waste vent, and even though it was only a 2-inch opening, it was big enough for a cup or three of the monsoon to have found its way into my boat in as many minutes.

Then, adding insult to injury, it was the forward hatch, directly overhead, contributing to the growing mutiny by allowing the marauding moisture to pass undeterred from the topside where it belonged onto the back of my neck where it didn't. I kicked out of my flip-flops, slid back and rolled onto my right side, taking up a new position in the increasingly humid front of the V-berth - sort of a fetal elbow-prop, and stared out at the dripping, steaming, plinking, stinking space between me and the companionway hatch. This was cool, I thought. This was my boat. This would be one of those rare but essential bonding experiences, I told myself.

A couple more minutes on one elbow, I'm just about as bonded as I care to be, and there's no letup from the liquid legions outside. As a pass-time I picked up from a bizarre flick Kevin Spacey once made up in Canada, I began trying to write an imaginary headline about a sailor who passes out in a rainstorm and drowns… inside the leaky cabin of his boat. I'm OK, really, as long as I have things to keep me busy. It's those other times I need to worry about.

As often happens when storm systems are driven by winds aloft, the sun came out about a minute before the rain actually stopped, low in the sky, blazing across the sparkling landscape from beneath a rumbling black thunderhead. Not only does this make for fabulous double and triple rainbows, but in her gradual, almost apologetic way, Nature ushers back in the warmth and peace that is normalcy. A quiet calm settles back over everything and one can quickly forget any moments of doubt or regret one may have been entertaining. I emerged from the cabin into the quiet, wet sunshine, marvelling at how clean everything looked. Just so that I could add one more accomplishment to the day, I climbed down out of the boat, walked around to the stern where the un-stepped mast jutted over the pushpit rail, reached up and affixed the radio antenna's NMO base to the mount on the masthead, feeling oddly again as if I had somehow survived an adventure that would have felled a lesser man.

The windows on the Durango were closed, as was the door, and I drove home thinking what a pretty-boy sissy that George Clooney was in "The Perfect Storm"…