Fishing in the Central Valley: Launching a boat can also launch your nerves

I’ll admit it, I tend to feel a little paranoid whenever I launch my boat.

I believe it’s because of the occasional embarrassing and stupid faux pas that I’ve managed to pull off in front of others at the dock in the past.

I think that launching a boat can be a simple thing unless you forget to do something critical.

For me, there are usually several key reasons that I miss a key step

• Too much talking.
• Changing my routine.
• Thinking too far ahead.

So, I have some guests show up at the dock who are ready to fish just as I’m backing my boat down close to the water for my pre- launch routine.

I stop for a minute and load all their stuff into the boat and as I’m talking to them, I am going around the boat, unhooking the straps, starting the sonar, and so on. I hurriedly made one last inspection before launch.

As a guide, I want to come off as the consummate professional.

In theory the boat should just glide off the trailer and we are ready to go. The trailer is nearly all the way in and the boat slides back a foot but is not floating off.

How could it be stuck? I was sure I had disconnected all the straps? I go back and look at what’s wrong- and I discover I didn’t unhook my starboard strap during my intense fishing conversation earlier.

Yep, stupid is how I felt. But it gets better, of course.

I think I can still pull the boat out of the water, release the strap and we’re good to go. I pull the boat out, run back and find that the boat had slid back a bunch causing the rear ratcheting strap to get locked in place and I can’t release it.

I figure I just need a tiny bit of slack to get it to release, so I have the guest go up to the front of the boat, reconnect the front winch and crank it up, hoping this might create the needed slack.

He’s a big strong guy and puts some muscle into it, as we’re sitting on the ramp just out of the water when I heard a loud pop.

The strap has broken and I need to fix it now before I can get the rear strap to loosen up. I take the winch end of the broken strap and attach it to the metal nose connector, tie it and apply some good ole Gorilla tape.

“Looks like you’ve done this before!” The guest opines.

“Yeah, sorta,” I concede.

Now we are able to safely go up the grade about 100 yards to the leveI parking area where I may be able to shift the boat forward on the trailer.

“So what can we do now !” the confused guest asks? “I’m going to get the whole rig going, slam on the brakes and this will hopefully cause the boat to slide forward on the wet trailer bunks.“

He seemed a little skeptical but I got the rig going on the level parking lot and then I hit the brakes hard. It actually worked as advertised sliding the boat a foot forward on the trailer.

We had all the slack we needed. He was impressed and I was gaining back some of the lost respect from earlier. He said I reminded him of MacGyver .

We lost over 30 minutes, but it turned out to be a great fishing trip. It usually works that way after an early setback for some reason.

Two weeks later, I am out alone and launching my boat.It slides off very nicely when I realize that I forgot to hook the leash rope to the boat.

But an unusual eastern breeze moved it right back to the dock and it sat there perfectly. In normal conditions, I would have had to go swimming after the boat. Of course, there was no one there to see that miracle.

It reassured me that even if you do stupid things — never give up.