Fishing Boat
That is me at the tiller of a fishing boat that my friend owned. handling the boat and being out on the ocean was like dying and going to heaven.
Two nice salmon fish. Mary Ellen looks like she may not be to impressed with the fish nearest to her. Mike looks like he is happy enough.
This is the boat my friend owned. It is old, and does not look like much but I loved to go out on the ocean with it. In those days I was flying so knew something about navigation which my friend did not know, so he would talk me into going along that way we could go out beyond where we could see the coast and still find our way home. The boat had a four cylinder engine that did not want to run, the generator did not work all the time, it leaked badly, because there were so many large steel fishing weights on the boat the weights caused the compass to read incorrectly but otherwise it was fine.
We did get stranded one day beyond the horision out of sight of land because the generator quit working, the battery went dead and we were dead in the water with not a boat in sight. we were stuck for many hours but just before sundown a fishing boat came within sight ans we were able to attract their attention and they came by and towed us into port
I was able to explain to the owner of the boat that if he allowed the fishing weights which were the size of shot puts probally 15 to 20 pounds they had an effect on the accuracy of the compass and that this was the reason the compass appeared to give the wrong heading. to demonstrate I took two of the balls and moved then quite close to the compass, this caused the needle to follow the direction of the weights. After the demonstration he was more careful with where he kept the weights.
These are some the fish we caught on a good day. There were days we did not catch any fish and other days we caught 10 or more. My friend bought the boat to make money but that never happened because the boat was not reliable enough the take it out and spend several days at sea at one time, but I enjoyed it.
Another photo of the fishing boat.
Born 08/13/1925