Boat trip

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Boat Trip

In the early summer of June 1988,I was invited to participate in a boat trip.I was only fourteen years old at the time,and had never been on a journey like this.The starting point was the Yukon River Bridge on the Dalton Highway just north of Livengood,Ak. Our destination was the village of Emmonak,Ak.,approximately 1,200 miles downriver,where my mother was born and raised.I believe at the time,the population was less than one thousand residents.

There were four of us;my dad,my brother Henry,Me,and Mark,who is a friend of the family.Both boats were homemade,constructed of marine plywood covered with fiberglass.My dad’s boat was sixteen feet long,and Mark’s boat was twenty feet.Both were powered by forty horsepower outboard motors.

My dad and Mark had spent most of the previous winter building the boats in our newly built garage.The boats were all wood construction.The ribs,about twelve inches apart and made of 3/4 inch lumber,were covered with 1/4 inch marine-grade plywood.The plywood was then covered in several coats of fiberglass,and then painted.The fiberglass covering made these wooden boats extremely strong.As I said earlier,they were powered by outboard motors.But they were not connected to steering wheels,like most modern boats.These boats had to be operated from the handle mounted directly on the motor.In hindsight,everyone would have opted for added time and cost of installing steering wheel and throttle controls.

We were loaded with two hundred forty gallons of fuel each.We had food to last for two weeks.We had a wall tent for camping.We had our fishing gear,and I couldn’t wait to catch some awesome pike along the way!I can still remember to this day how terrible the mosquitoes were on the beach.One could literally not breathe,the mosquitoes were so bad!I needed a net over my head in order go into the woods to gather firewood,and poles for the wall tent.

The First Day

The first day went alright.The water as pretty smooth.The sky was gray,and intermittently rainy.Days two and three were nightmarish.The wind picked up,and there was a three to five foot chop on the water.The bigger boat wasn’t bad,but the smaller boat would just get hammered on the waves.Day four was smooth as glass,and sunny skies.Day five was atrocious.We encountered heavy wind,with waves cresting at fifteen feet,extremely close together.Very scary.Luckily,we got past that after a short time.

Destination;Emmonak

Then we arrived at our destination;Emmonak. When we got off the boat,none of us could walk properly.We all had sea legs.It was a comical sight,to see four white guys stumbling on the beach like inebriated sailors. Lol. The locals were all eskimos,and they were a little concerned that we had been on the water on such a nasty day.Coupled with the fact that we all looked drunk,we definitely got some strange looks.

As a funny side note,there were several villages that we passed by on the way down.Each place we stopped, thought we had come downriver to sell fuel.They were begging us for fuel,because the spring barge was late coming upriver that year.Unfortunately,we didn’t know how much fuel we were going to need,so we had to tell them no.

All in all,the trip was a success,and a great adventure for all of us.

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Until tommorow

Benjamin