Amanda Lewis spends her summers working in the often exciting family business of fishing charters on Lake Huron, but her winters are cold, dull, and boring. In Florida, where it’s warm, she’s looking for a cheap boat she can live on, and her Coast Guardsman brother has found a possibility in the Rag Doll. But at first sight the boat is grubby, dirty, and needs lots of restoration, so it is a very sad Rag Doll. In better days it must have been a doll of a boat, flying the glad rags of her sails, a bone in her teeth as she sailed across bright ocean waves toward some distant, exotic destination. She could tell that this boat didn’t deserve to be sitting sad and forlorn at the edge of a swamp in a muddy backwater. There was a soul of a boat waiting to be freed from its misery. It would be a lot of work, but deep down inside she knew there could be a lot of satisfaction for doing it, too. “Yes, Rag Doll,” she said softly, “you and I are going to have some great times together.”"
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Published by Spearfish Lake Tales
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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The cover photo, "Woman_on_a_sailboat_in_bikini_-Bermuda-11Oct2007.jpg" by Chris Fore, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license on Wikimedia Commons.
I want to thank my usual crew of editors, Bob Haeffner, Warren Stewart, Derek Wright and someone who wishes to remain anonymous for their help in chasing down fluffs, typos, and downright errors. There would be many more of them than the few that slip through thanks to their careful oversight. Special thanks go to Bud Puch for fact checking. Also, thanks to Doug Gehon, who does the e-book conversions. This book is better than it would have been without their help.
-- WB
