Lakes, Fishing And Pontoon Boat Seats
Some friends and I lately visited the Muskoka region of Ontario, where an old college mate (Jerod) recently had a second hand motorboat from a retiring Quebecois couple. He’d promised a few us a beautiful weekend on the water, on the condition that we help get this secondhand boat seaworthy.
This was, regrettably, somewhat a challenge. Most of the paint on the hull was rusting, the motor was in urgent need of a tune-up, and the pontoon seats were flaky and frayed. It wasn’t quite the weekend of enjoyment we’d been looking to, but it was an exciting (or at least interesting) one nevertheless.
It started off with a half-dozen stops at nearby hardware, boating and home decoration shops, haphazardly collecting the components we required to get the “Rose of Conakry” (as Jerod had dubbed her) shipshape once more. To my wonder, the pontoon boat seats proved to be the most difficult to spruce up.
While most of the mechanical problems could be solved with either a bit of oil or a reluctantly-purchased substitution part, the pontoon seats were strongly fused into the boat itself, rendering it unlikely to replace with removing a considerable part of the furnishings.
Our initial efforts to fix them together with transparent tape and glue yielded unsuccessful – we made the pontoon boat seat equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. Rather, we ended up just ripping out most of the fabric, and substituting it with some off-white material we’d chemically treated for water damage.
Unfortunately, the “Rose of Conakry” will never get the fresh-off-the-line appeal it must’ve had previously, but I almost like it this way, it seems rugged, lived in. Around Sunday afternoon we ultimately were able to take the “Rose” out onto the water, where we spent a few hours of kicking back beers and waiting for the fish.
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