Adam got in the Buick the next morning for his trip downstate. For once there weren’t many people hanging around the snack bar at that hour, and the day’s fishing customers weren’t expected for a while yet, so the three Lewises sat around having an extra cup of coffee before Jake and Amanda had to head down to the Chinook.

“Now that Adam isn’t around,” Amanda’s father said, “How did he do with the Moonshadow? I mean, really?”

“Pretty well,” she replied. “It was rough going the day before yesterday, but he hung in there with it. I actually think he enjoyed it in a way. He seemed to be careful, in spite of being excited about the new boat. I know he doesn’t have much experience but he seems to use what he has pretty well.”

“I’m glad you think so. I was sort of wondering if the jump to the Moonshadow might not be too big a one for him.”

“I don’t think so. I mean, he’s already a lot better than a lot of the idiots we see coming through here in the summer traffic.”

“Well, good,” Jake said. “Let’s face it, our relationship with Adam is a little strange, but I feel responsible for him.”

“Stuff can always happen, but I’m not too worried about it,” she said. “He’s mature, he thinks, and he keeps his cool. That’s worth a lot.”

“Yes, it is,” her mother smiled. “And on the subject of thinking, have you made any more progress on what you’re going to do when the season winds down?”

“Still working on it,” Amanda admitted. “I know I haven’t been able to do a lot of looking for boats in the last few days, but you remember from when I was talking with Ron the other day, he suggested that I go down to Florida and look around down there? The more I think about it, the more it seems like a good idea.”

“You wouldn’t be able to stay with him,” her father pointed out. “He lives on base somewhere.”

“True, but I wouldn’t be spending all my time around Jacksonville, either. It would get expensive to motel it every night, but I suppose I could keep it up for a while and do a lot of boat looking while I’m there. I’m going to spend the next few evenings on the Internet checking out what’s down there, although I wouldn’t be surprised if what I’m looking for isn’t going to turn up on the Internet at all.”

“What are you going to do if you find a boat down there?” her mother wanted to know. “You wouldn’t be able to spend the winter working on it here.”

“I know,” Amanda replied. “That’s part of the reason I need to be a little on the careful side. I figure if I find a boat, it’ll have to be one that I can live aboard right from the beginning while I’m working on it, and the work it’ll need will have to be things I can do. But I can do a lot if I can find the right cheap boat. If I can’t find what I want down there, I guess I’ll just have to come back here and sit around until spring.”

“I’d almost suggest that you spend some time on the Winter Haven,” Jake told her. “But that’s not going to work this year. Right now the boat is scheduled pretty tight, and right at the moment it looks like your mother and I aren’t going to use it at all.”

The Winter Haven was a boat the Lewis family owned with several other families. It was a Bayliner 250, a trailer boat 25 feet long, although it had a huge volume for a trailer boat, several times the size of the Knick-Knack, which was of the same length. The bad part was that it sailed like a pig and was pretty dependent on its outboard motor. The group that owned the boat normally kept it on a trailer on the western side of Florida in the summer, and only sailed it in the winter, usually between Ft. Myers and the Keys. What Amanda knew about sailing in Florida came from her experience on the Winter Haven, and it was one reason why she’d wanted a more capable boat.

“The Winter Haven hadn’t even figured into my plans,” she admitted. “Oh, if it were sitting down on the water unused, it might be a cheap place to stay for a while instead of staying in motels or something. But the odds are that if I find a boat it would be somewhere else.”

“Probably true,” Jake said. “Well, I suppose we’d better finish our coffee, get down to the dock, and get the Chinook warmed up.”

As always, getting the big sport-fisherman going was a pretty routine chore; both Jake and Amanda knew what they had to do and had done it for years. They had everything ready to go before the customers showed up, even to the point of having a pot of coffee going, so father and daughter found places in the cockpit to sit with coffee cups in their hand. “So you still think you want to find another fixer-upper to work on, I take it?” he asked.

“Well, if I were to turn up something the size and condition of the Moonshadow for a thousand or two, I sure wouldn’t turn it down,” she smiled. “But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Whatever you decide to do, be careful,” he shook his head. “A bargain boat you have to fix up may not be a bargain, and you ought to know that by now. You can get in over your head so damn quick it ain’t funny. I mean, on the surface it looks like you made out pretty well on the Knick-Knack but when you stop and think about it you almost got burned on the deal. You put how much time into that boat? Five hundred hours working on it, maybe?”

“Something like that. I wasn’t keeping track.”

“And you made $4500 on it, which isn’t bad, although you got lucky in the process. That means you made about nine bucks an hour, which also isn’t bad considering you’d have paid a lot more to have someone else do what you did.”

“Well, I wasn’t doing anything else most of the time anyway.”

“True,” Jake nodded. “And you had the advantage that you didn’t really have to replace a whole lot. The boat was complete and sound, just dirty and needed maintenance. If you wind up getting some junker off the back of a boat yard, you can get into trouble real quick. A new motor, new sails, new rigging or something like that can take away just about every buck you can make on the deal.”

“I realize that,” she said. “That’s why I was pretty careful when I bought the Knick-Knack. I knew it was pretty close to complete, and at the time I wasn’t buying it with the idea of reselling it. I was going to take it to Florida to go cruising in the winter.”

“That’s a point,” Jake conceded. “Look, I guess what I’m saying is that if you buy another boat you’d better be thinking about doing it for love, or for using it, rather than just for the sake of money. There’s a good chance you may not make a lot out of it.”

“I know, Dad. I guess I’ll just have to make sure that whatever I do will be worth the effort in one way or the other.”

“You’re pretty level-headed about things,” Jake smiled. “I know you don’t want to stay around here this winter if you don’t have anything to do, and I don’t blame you. Hell, that was why your mother and I used to take off all winter when we weren’t much older than you are now.”

“Where do you think I got the idea?” she grinned as she looked around, then added, “Looks like the customers are here.”

“Right, time to get the game face on.”

Things settled down for the next few weeks. Salmon fishing is usually good in the fall on the Great Lakes, and the Chinook and the Coho, the smaller boat owned by the company but usually operated by Amanda’s grandfather Nate, were out on the lake virtually every day the weather was reasonable. Since Amanda would be past her twenty-first birthday by the time the new fishing season rolled around in the spring, she would be qualified to hold the license needed to be captain of one of the boats. To help get her ready for it, Jake let her operate the boat as if she were the captain and just did the deckhand duties while he carried the license. This put a little bit more responsibility on her in various areas, especially when it came to looking for fish, but it was something she knew how to handle and the customers hardly noticed the change.

It was a couple of days before Adam made it back to Winchester Harbor. He reported that he’d taken the time to get the Knick-Knack out of the water and onto the trailer for the winter, and had gotten the mast down so he could cover the whole works with tarps. In the process he’d unloaded a lot of gear from the little boat so he could move it over to the Moonshadow. At least now there would be silverware on board.

Adam moved into a room in the motel and spent most of his days with his new boat – sometimes working on it, since it needed a thorough cleaning and lots of varnish. He took it out several times for solo day sails on nice days, which got fewer and fewer as the month of October rolled along. Amanda often wondered what he was going to do when fishing season closed at the end of the month and the boats would come out of the water for the winter.

As far as that went, she was wondering about the same question for herself. It seemed pretty obvious that a trip to Florida was in her future, although it seemed likely she wouldn’t be able to stay all winter without seriously depleting her boat fund – motel rooms were expensive, after all. Still, maybe some kind of a junk job like working in a fast food joint again would allow her to spend most of the winter down there. In any case, she wasn’t in any great rush to get down there; there would be work to be done on the Moonshadow and the fishing boats after they came out of the water. By the time that was starting to get wrapped up it would be getting close to Christmas. At least that still offered the opportunity to spend the worst months of the winter where it was warm.

Then things changed suddenly with a phone call one evening. She, her folks, and Adam were having dinner in the snack bar as was usually the case – there was more room there than the kitchen in the house – when the phone rang. Her mother happened to be close to the phone at the time, and answered it. In a few seconds she said, “Amanda, it’s for you. It’s Ron.”

Amanda hadn’t talked with him for a month, since their discussion about him looking for a boat for her. Could it be he’d found one?

“Hey, I hope you’re still looking for a boat,” he said. “How does a Triton 28 sound to you?”

“Oh, wow!” she said. “Ron, you didn’t!”

“I sure did. The boat is no real winner. It’s going to need a lot of work, but a lot of it is cosmetic. It’s been in the water without being used for years and I’ll bet there’s a ton of crap hanging on the bottom. It’s dirty as hell, and there’s been water in it in the past, so some of the woodwork has gone to hell. For all of that, the boat looks to be pretty sound. At least, that’s what Chief Barnes from here at the station and I think. We went through it pretty seriously. It looks like a lot of work but it’s work you could do.”

“Wow, Ron, I can’t believe it! How much?”

“It was a repo at a bank auction this afternoon, and I was the only bidder. You can pay me back the two hundred and fifty bucks I spent on it. It’s the lowest they’d let me bid.”

“Oh, wow! I mean, wow!”

“If you don’t want it I suppose it could be junked. There ought to be enough lead in the keel to make it worth that, even if the rest of it turns out to be a piece of shit.”

“Hey, great!” she laughed, scarcely able to believe her ears. “Let me tell the folks.” She put the phone on her shoulder and gushed, “He found a boat for me.”

“What is it?” Jake asked. “Is it any good?”

“It’s a Triton,” she replied. “Just about the perfect boat, a 28-footer. He says it’s in pretty sad shape, but it’s more or less sound. “

“How much?” Jake shook his head. “It might not be worth the effort, although Ron has a good eye for boats if anyone does.”

“That’s the good part,” she said. “He paid two hundred and fifty dollars for it.”

“Two-fifty? Are you kidding?”

“Two-fifty,” she smiled. “It was a bank repo and it was up for auction. He was the only bidder, and that was the lowest they’d let him bid.”

“Holy crap,” Jake shook his head again. “If a Triton is floating and not depending on its bilge pump to keep it above the water, it’d be worth ten times that at the absolute minimum for a huge piece of shit. There’s got to be something wrong with it if it’s a bank repo.”

“He says it’s going to need a lot of work, but I figured that was going to happen. Dad, I know the season isn’t over with yet, but I really want to get down and check this out.”

Jake turned to Adam. “New boat bug bites again,” he said with a shake of his head. “Are you up for being a deckhand on the Chinook for the rest of the season?”

“Sure, it’s something to do,” he grinned. “Besides, the only way you’re going to be keeping Amanda around here is if chains are involved.”

“I really should go down and give it a good looking over,” Jake said. “But there’s no way Amanda and I can both be gone at the same time until the season is over with and the boats are out of the water.”

“I’ve got a good idea of what to look for,” Amanda said. “And I might not get that far anyway.” She put her ear back to the phone for a minute and exchanged a few words with her older brother. “Ron says the boat has to be moved to a slip somewhere in the next few days, but he can take care of it. But I have to get down there to take care of the paperwork before it can be moved.”

“So go already,” Jake shook his head. “We’ll just have to get along without you.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said, and turned to the phone again. “Ron, I’ll leave in the morning. It’ll probably take me two or three days to get there, but see what you can do about finding a slip, preferably in a place where I can work on the boat . . . OK . . . OK . . . I owe you a big one on this, Ron. See you in a few days, and thanks again!” She hung up the phone and said, “Holy crap! A Triton 28! That’s pretty close to the top of my list anyway, and for that price!”

“Be careful with it,” Jake told her. “God alone knows what’s wrong with it, and that boat is old. They made the last of them back in the sixties sometime, so it’s got to be even older than the Mary Sue. And that’s another one of those boats with an Atomic 4, so you know what I think of them. There’s a dead one sitting in the Moonshadow you know.”

“Ron has no idea if it can be made to run or what,” Amanda explained. “He really doesn’t know much about it, other than the fact that it appears sound but is going to need a lot of work. I can hardly wait to see what it’s going to take and get started on it!”

“You might as well go get packing,” Rachel put in. “You’re not going to be doing anything else useful tonight anyway.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “I’ll get down there sometime after the season is over with to give it a good looking over, but all I can say is be back here for the season opener in the spring. It’d be nice if you’re a few days early so you can help get the boats set up for the season. And it’d be even nicer if you get your six-pack license down there so you can be the captain of one of the charter boats. Ron can probably get you going on that. Other than that, see us in the morning before you leave.”

“OK, Dad. Wow! A Triton 28! I can’t believe it. I’ll catch you later.” An instant later there was a bang as the door slammed behind her. There was going to be a lot to do if she wanted to get on the road in the morning.

She was still bubbling with excitement as she headed for her room in the motel. If she’d had a physical list of the boats she really would have liked to find, a Triton 28 would have been right near the top of it. While it was an old boat – older than she was by a wide margin, and probably older than the Knick-Knack – she knew that a number of them had been around the world. She didn’t think she’d want to try going around Cape Horn in one, but if it was in good shape it ought to be adequate for at least short ocean passages. If the boat wasn’t too far gone, she might be able to bring it back into shape to do just that.

Ron really hadn’t told her a great deal about the boat, other than it needed a lot of work, but a lot of it was clearly going to have to be the kind of elbow grease work like she’d done on the Knick-Knack. She could probably handle some of the woodwork, but just exactly what would be needed and how bad it would be just had to wait until she could see the boat herself.

Would she be able to live on the boat while she worked on it? There was no way of telling – it might involve quite a bit of work to just get it to the point where she could sort of camp out on it.

Since she knew she was going to have a boat to work on down there somewhere around Jacksonville, wherever it was, she might as well take a carload of tools and supplies with her. She had a few tools of her own down in the shop, and her father would probably be willing to let her borrow some more, so long as she didn’t take anything critical he would need for working on the Moonshadow or the fishing boats. Well, about all she could do was take what she could, and if she needed something maybe she could borrow it or buy it.

And then, without actually having talked to her father about it, it seemed likely that he’d show up down there to pitch in on the boat, whatever the name was, for a while. Maybe her mother would come, too, although someone was going to have to run the snack bar since there were always a few local customers like Sam over the winter months. If her dad came down, by then she ought to know if some special tool or something would be needed from the boat shop in Winchester Harbor, so he could bring it with him.

On the other hand, there was no huge rush to get the boat done. It could easily take all winter, and depending on just how bad the boat was it could take more winters than one. The idea, after all, was to have something to do in the winter, and to get a boat to go cruising on. Even working on the boat for a couple winters would be acceptable. It would cost her something for storage fees to leave it unattended for the summer, but Ron would most likely be around to keep an eye on it. If the boat was going to be a more expensive fix, well, she’d be earning even more money as a part-time captain of one of the charter boats up here out of Winchester Harbor.

Really, while getting the boat done sooner or later was obviously the goal, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have a little more fun down there this winter than just working on the boat. She didn’t have any big ideas on that but she was sure Ron would be able to suggest something. There were, after all, places to go and things to see in Florida that didn’t involve boats. This way she could have her cake and eat it, too.

This was going to work out a lot better than she’d expected all the way around, assuming the boat wasn’t a total loss. And, if it was, at least she’d be in Florida where she could look around for another prospect.

There was going to be a lot to do to get ready to go in the next few hours. She could hardly wait to get on the road so she could see what her new boat would be like – and what it was going to take to get it like she wanted it.

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