When we bought the boat a couple

of years ago, the fellow at the dealer's eased her expertly off blocks

and onto the trailer Dave had purchased.

From then on, getting her off

and on that trailer would be up to us. After several months of refurbishing

and outfitting, it was time.

We put Alice III into the Chattahoochee

for her maiden voyage in spring of 1999, using a shallow concrete ramp

and a convenient dock. Dave manned the Jeep; I had the A-3 on a leash

and managed not to embarrass myself.

After the boat slipped into

the river, I tied her fast and even hauled the stern over to the dock,

dropping fenders expertly in place to keep from rubbing her hull. But

one of the truisms of boatmanship is that for every smooth operation,

there is a potential disaster waiting to happen usually witnessed by other

boaters and a harbor master who has seen it all in his 62 years on the

job.

Of course, if the marina guy

is standing there, Dave runs the boat and lets him secure it. It's when

we're coming in unassisted, say, like into a lock, that things get sticky.

Docking even a small boat is not like parallel-parking a car, itself no

easy feat. Biggest difference: Boats have no brakes.

Here's our routine: I take

the wheel because Dave worries that I'll hurt myself grabbing a post or

falling between boat and pier. I line up with the dock, painfully aware

that the props on the boat next to where I plan to moor are just inches

away. Invariably, he's going to yell to that I'm coming in too fast.

So I exaggerate slowing down,

trying for a full stop still several feet away. Trouble is, when you take

an outboard out of gear, you lose steerage. This isn't a sailboat, where

a push on the tiller changes direction right up until you're dead in the

water. Put the A-3 in neutral, and she's out of control.

Factors such as current and

wind compound the complications, and it doesn't help that for reverse

you pull the gearshift toward you, for forward you push it away exactly

the opposite of the Jeep. OK, a quick burst of reverse to stop her. But

the engine's pointing the wrong way, despite a little gizmo Dave bought

that shows which way it's heading. Even though I can picture it, I can

never remember what that means to my direction. In most cases, it's bad

news:

The rear end of the boat is

swinging away from the dock and we're now in classic T-bone position.

It gets worse in a lock, where you're snubbing up to a slimy wall 80 feet

high. If the bow is at an angle, the anchor makes a hideous sproinging

sound as the boat recoils, or the canopy over the stern scrapes off 40

years' worth of TVA slime and grinds it into a new abrasion in the canvas.

But as we launched, all these

mishaps were still ahead of us, interspersed with landings that would

make a professional proud usually unobserved by anyone else.

At the top end of our shakedown

cruise, we tied Alice up behind the Columbus river boat and walked around

town, our first time off the boat in a week. We felt like sailors on shore

leave. Everything was interesting.

Entering a restaurant for a

bite of lunch, we noticed a fellow tooling down the street in a perfectly

stunning vintage car with his lady beside him. Half an hour later, we

strolled by a park and saw the same guy standing in front of a trailer

hitched to a van. And then we realized that his girlfriend was lining

up the car to put it on the trailer. Would he... ? He would.

Standing in front of her on

the trailer tongue, he directed her to drive the car up the tracks. I

could hardly bear to look. I tried to imagine Dave trusting me like that.

I guess you can see what's coming.

The day eventually arrived

when we had to pull our trawler out of the river. We tied up to the same

dock I had lashed her to two weeks earlier. Dave walked to the parking

lot, started the Jeep and swung around to back the trailer into the water.

Then he signaled to me to drive the boat onto the trailer.

He can't mean it, I thought,

pulling in lines, turning the key, and backing away from the dock. But

he did. Standing in front of the winch stand, he signaled me forward,

corrected my position slightly, and gestured that I should go for it.

What a horrible feeling! As

the bow began to climb the trailer bed, it turned skyward and Dave disappeared.

I thought I had driven right up over him, and stopped. But he materialized

alongside and said, "Back off and do it again, and don't be so timid.

You didn't get her on far enough."

Oh, Lord, again?

Somehow I did it. I put her

in reverse and backed away until I could hardly see the trailer, then

headed shoreward again. By now a fisherman was at the dock watching every

move. I felt like the Queen Mary barreling into Manhattan in some horror

flick. Making tiny corrections as long as I could see Dave's hands, I

ran up on the trailer, expecting at any moment to feel the hull of our

beloved boat crash down on the concrete, shattering like an egg.

"Perfect," he said,

appearing alongside. "Shut her down. I'll winch it the rest of the

way."

My knees nearly buckled. But

the fisherman looked impressed.

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