Deeper thinkers than me say we are attracted to water because we are carried by our mothers in water until we are evicted from that warm watery place and that's why we yearn for water the rest of our lives. I don't know if that's true, but the yearning part is certainly true for me. My parents gave me swimming lessons at the YMCA and after that you couldn't keep me away from water. The kids in our neighborhood in east Medford would ride our bikes as a pack to the big swimming pool in Hawthorne Park where we'd spend all day swimming and diving and just hanging around the pool. When I was about 13, my grandmother moved to an apartment that had a pool in the center courtyard. After that I would ride my bike 5 miles across town and stay with her, often swimming until after 10 p.m. in the warm summer evenings.
My dad and I built a 14 foot boat when I was about 10. That boat took us fishing for years to Diamond Lake and Howard Prairie and other local lakes. When I was a teenager, my dad bought a 30 horse Johnson outboard, big enough to make the boat go fast enough to water ski. And we water skied behind that boat until the engine failed my last year in high school.
I bought a VW beetle when I was a senior in high school. One of the first things I did was buy a sailboat that I could carry on top of the car. It was an El Toro, an 8 foot pram with one sail and a 14 foot mast. I sailed that boat all over southern Oregon and even took it up to Detroit Lake in the Cascades east of Salem. It wasn't fast, or glamorous, but I loved that little boat and kept it until I got drafted in 1969 after I finished college.
My dad had moved on to other boats too, ocean-going boats that he trailered over to Brookings or Coos Bay on the Oregon coast. We spent many happy days out in the Pacific catching salmon that we took home and barbequed. The ocean was water on steroids...with whales, porpoises, seals, sea lions, sharks. and sometime giant waves.
I've still got boats; a green 15 foot racing sailboat named Kermit, a Zodiac dinghy, and a 28 foot fly-bridge cruiser named Irish Mist that stays at Scappoose Bay just off the Multnomah Channel, unless it's on the trailer going to the San Juan Islands or down to the mouth of the Columbia River.
Nowadays I love having Irish Mist available to go on a moment's notice. There's nothing I love better than poking my nose into all the little inlets, river mouths, and bays up and down the channel and out on the main Columbia River. We'll go to some of those places soon.
My dad and I built a 14 foot boat when I was about 10. That boat took us fishing for years to Diamond Lake and Howard Prairie and other local lakes. When I was a teenager, my dad bought a 30 horse Johnson outboard, big enough to make the boat go fast enough to water ski. And we water skied behind that boat until the engine failed my last year in high school.
I bought a VW beetle when I was a senior in high school. One of the first things I did was buy a sailboat that I could carry on top of the car. It was an El Toro, an 8 foot pram with one sail and a 14 foot mast. I sailed that boat all over southern Oregon and even took it up to Detroit Lake in the Cascades east of Salem. It wasn't fast, or glamorous, but I loved that little boat and kept it until I got drafted in 1969 after I finished college.
My dad had moved on to other boats too, ocean-going boats that he trailered over to Brookings or Coos Bay on the Oregon coast. We spent many happy days out in the Pacific catching salmon that we took home and barbequed. The ocean was water on steroids...with whales, porpoises, seals, sea lions, sharks. and sometime giant waves.
I've still got boats; a green 15 foot racing sailboat named Kermit, a Zodiac dinghy, and a 28 foot fly-bridge cruiser named Irish Mist that stays at Scappoose Bay just off the Multnomah Channel, unless it's on the trailer going to the San Juan Islands or down to the mouth of the Columbia River.
Nowadays I love having Irish Mist available to go on a moment's notice. There's nothing I love better than poking my nose into all the little inlets, river mouths, and bays up and down the channel and out on the main Columbia River. We'll go to some of those places soon.