GroupWBench

The first time I ever drove a car was in an empty K-Mart parking lot on a Sunday morning. My dad had taken me out to begin learning to drive. This was on the south side of Montgomery, Alabama in a sort of not-the-best-neighborhood area. The parking lot had many beer and soda cans strewn about from late night partiers. My dad had me drive around and try to crush the cans. We started by just calling it success if I could hit a specified can at all. Eventually, I graduated to crushing a specific can with a specific wheel of the car. The exercise really gave me a feel for where the wheels were and how to maneuver the car. I still smile at the memory of the happy sound of a can crunching under a tire. What I learned from that helped me learn to be a better driver fairly quickly. It was a nice way to get a feel for driving and parking a car without incurring the risk from driving on public streets or parking lots full of cars to run into.

This weekend the rains let up for long enough for Ivy and I to go out to the boat and motor out. There wasn’t a breath of wind out when we left the marina so we didn’t even bother to pull the sail cover or prep the boat for sailing. Ivy took the helm on the way out and took us out towards the middle of our arm of the lake. She pointed at an unopened long neck beer bottle bobbing off to the side of the boat and we decided to see if we could snag it. It took her a couple of runs at the bottle before I could reach it. I had our boat hook in my hand and was going to try to pull it in with the hook so that I could reach over the side and grab the bottle. I managed to flip the bottle over so that the top was pointed down…at which point it sank. I think I knocked a rusty cap off the bottle as I was reaching for it.

From there we went over to the empty mooring field and she practiced turning into our slip, without docks or other boats to worry with. She used the mooring balls as the end of our dock and would come up to it and turn in as if we were turning into the slip. It was a great way to get used to the way the boat handles and get a feel for turning into a slip without incurring the risk from the dangers associated with a busy slipway full of boats and docks to bump into. It was the boating equivalent of crushing cans in an empty parking lot.