JUNE 10, 2025 – (Cont.) On a weekend trip to the cabin the next spring, we spotted a boat for sale in front of a familiar battered country house on Highway 70 just east of Spooner 30 miles from Grindstone. It was a Ouchita (an alternate spelling of “Witchita”) rowboat with an eight-horse Mariner motor, all resting on a beat-up trailer. I didn’t much care about the condition of the trailer, since it would be making only a single trip to the lake. The boat itself had a much broader beam than Grandpa’s Alumacraft, and for bonus points, it had a plug in the stern, which the Alumacraft lacked[1].
The gruff owner of the Ouchita had rigged up a tank of water under the motor to demonstrate that the old Mariner worked. With that and in consideration of 400 bucks that I delivered the following weekend, we hauled the new-old boat to Grindstone Lake. Our somewhat vintage toy got a fair amount of use, even though the Mariner was a “long-shaft” outboard, meaning exactly that: the shaft between engine and prop was extra-long. This feature had escaped my notice when I’d purchased the boat and produced a degree of buyer’s remorse, given how treacherous the rock bars and underwater boulders in the lake can be. In our corner especially was a boulder that the Blue Ribbon Champion had struck all too often[2] back in earlier times when Dad or Grandpa had seen fit to take us out in the Alumacraft—“with the motor,” as I would always plea and usually in futility. What our lake called for was a regular-length shaft to get the prop as high as possible, not a long-shaft, to get the prop as low as possible.
These shallows—and the boulder—would play a major role in our family’s lacustrine history, but that part of the tale was nearly a decade over the horizon of the deep blue sea.
During the intervening cabin seasons, however, our family tooled around in the Ouchita fishing boat, exploring all corners of the lake and on occasion, fishing where more serious fishing people than we—judging by their boats and equipment—tended to drop anchor.
As the boys grew older, however, they spent more time on “Uncle Fun’s” sleek new deck boat with its engine the size of a small house and sufficient power and acceleration to tow an adult water skier cheered on by a half dozen or more adult passengers. The eight-horse Mariner on the Ouchita wasn’t nearly fast or flashy enough. Beth suggested that for a weekend we rent a runabout from M & M Rentals in Hayward—”just to see how we like it.” I had to admit that despite my affinity for sailing, it would be fun to skipper a full-fledged “motorboat” equipped with something more than the eight-horse Mariner. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
[1] The “work-around” for the lack of a plug was the ingenious boat cradle that Grandpa had acquired back in the early 1940s from the “Minneapolis Dock Works”—appearing in raised lettering on the two independent (front and back) steel sections, each of which rested on four long steel legs. Both front and back sections were equipped with a long, three-inch diameter steel roller to which a length of rope was attached. The rope could be cranked up or down by turning the cast iron crank attached to one end of the roller. The rope on the front section hooked to a large eye-bolt fastened to the bow of the boat. The rear section of the apparatus was where the innovative engineering applied most generously. The rope on the rear roller was arranged in a large loop that passed under the boat as you maneuvered it into the cradle. After hooking the bow to the front rope and cranking it up two or three feet, you turned the rear section crank so that the looped rope lifted the stern out of the water to a point where the boat was suspended parallel to the water. Next, you pulled a metal fitting inside the very end of the rear roller where the hand crank was attached. Inside the roller, this fitting was connected to a six-inch hook protruding from the outside of the roller. When you pulled on the fitting then turned the rear hand crank, the hook would catch one side of the rope that was looped under the boat; crank some more and another hook (attached to the other side of the rope) that you placed on the starboard gunwale would cause the boat to flip over. The simple but whacky and creative engineering of this Rube Goldberg boat cradle fascinated me. I never tired of watching Dad or Grandpa operate it—or working it myself after I turned 10. The only downside was that you couldn’t leave the outboard motor on the transom, and of course, anything left unsecured inside the boat would tumble into the water. The only other cradle of its kind that I’ve ever seen belonged to our equally secluded neighbors, the Campbells, on the east side of Björnholm. Their version, however, was limited to the rear section of the cradle. Their wooden boat (with a plug) was much heavier than our Alumacraft and was equipped with a larger (no-name) outboard than our four-horse Blue Ribbon Champion. Clearly, early on Mr. Campbell and Grandpa had exchanged information about boat cradles. (The Campbells, being of the same vintage as my grandparents, had built their cabin in 1926; my grandparents built theirs 14 years later).
[2] When learning about the hidden dangers lurking in the lake, guests often ask why the prop-wreckers aren’t marked by buoys. The answer is that if all were marked, the peripheral waters would be a sea of (unsightly) buoys. Whenever the prop of the Blue Ribbon Champion struck the boulder (or other submerged obstacles), the force of the strike would break a specially designed pin, thus separating the prop axle from the drive shaft so that nothing but the easily accessible and replaceable pin would need to be installed.
