I was impressed by Kaylie Jasinski’s recent article, where she did an excellent job of expressing her excitement at buying her first boat (proptalk.com/life-short-buy-boat). They say a boat owner is happy twice: first when they buy their boat and then when they sell it. I have experienced that pleasure several times in my life, but this last time was more bittersweet than pleasure.
I bought my first boat when I was in my 20s. It was a 14-foot aluminum skiff with a 15-hp motor. I used it to chase flounder in the Back Bays and even made a few trips to the Eastern Shore of Virginia to fish for flounder.
Once we bought a camper and put it on a lot at Bay Shore Campgrounds in Ocean View, I wanted a bigger boat. To satisfy that want, I bought a 21-foot Starcraft center console. That was a great boat, and I fished it in the ocean and bay during the time when we had trout in the bay and bluefin tuna as close as the Delaware Lightship.
Unfortunately, the motor on that boat failed me at the beginning of the season. Somehow the lower unit oil drained out over the winter and on the first run of the season the gears ground to a halt due to lack of lubrication and I was lucky to make it back to the ramp.
This was while we were buying a new house, and by the time I got the boat back we needed money to buy extras for our new home. I put the boat up for sale and the next Saturday I had four or five customers waiting at my dock. The first guy tried to lowball my price, and I said no, and called for the second guy to step up. The first guy did a quick consideration and gave me my asking price.
So, there I was without a boat, but fortunately, my brother-in-law Paul Coffin had bought a 22-foot Mako, and we set out on a journey that provided me with experiences that I could not imagine.
The first year we fished for blues and bluefin tuna inside the Delaware Lightship. That was a shakedown year where we found out what we needed to make the boat capable of running to the canyons for tuna and marlin.
The next year that’s what we did. We were one of the first small boats to run offshore. We had a ball. We could hear the captains of the bigger boats refer to us as the little boat and that’s what Paul named the Mako, Little Boat. The following year Paul, Lark Bonelli, and I brought in the first white marlin of the year to Delaware.
While all of this was going on, I purchased a 14-foot tin boat to fish the Back Bays from Bay Shore. Then a 20-foot Bertram came up for sale and I borrowed money from my mother and the boat was mine.
What a sweet boat that was. It was the Moppie model and had a little cabin forward and a six-cylinder Mercury outdrive. I loved telling people, “Yeah, I own a Bertram.”
That boat followed me to Virginia Beach. When I went into the charter business, I had to sell it, and I moved up to a 24-foot Albemarle. That boat was the best of all my fleet. I used it for charters for 15 years and finally had to sell it when we moved back to Delaware and the charter business died.
My last boat was a 16-foot Starcraft that I bought to fish the Back Bays here in Sussex County, DE. It has served me well, but now I can’t take it out by myself, and I have decided to give it to my son Roger. He and my two grandchildren will make good use of it and that will make the pain of not having a boat a little easier to bear.
By Eric Burnley