In 7th Grade, I met another kid who was a year older than me. His name was Jason, and he was every bit as big of a nerd as I was. In fact, he was even a little more nerdy than me — he wore glasses. I don’t recall how we met, but I do remember that it didn’t take long for us to hit it off.

One of the things that was very cool about Jason was his family had an awesome boat. It was a Starcraft SS160. The tan hull was an open bow variety and it was powered with a 50hp Mercury outboard motor. At the age of 13, Jason had studied diligently for his Minnesota Watercraft Operators Permit. He took the test, and passed. Even more amazing to me was that his parents trusted him with the boat, and whenever asked, would drop us off at the local lake for a lazy afternoon or evening on the water without any adult supervision.

Whenever we got the chance, Jason, Matt, and I would take the boat to Long Lake and just hang out. We’d cruise the lake a bunch of times at full speed thinking we were on top of the world. When we grew tired of that, we’d just drift and talk endlessly about things that seemed important to us at the time. We’d talk about boats, about computers, about school, about our parents, about our futures….and……we’d talk about girls. Of course, we didn’t know anything about girls. None of us had girlfriends. We had no idea how to get a girlfriend. You have to remember, we were nerds. It made us feel better to talk about it though, so we did.

Those boat trips were some of the happiest times of my childhood. It was amazing to be trusted by our parents to be in charge of that expensive machine. It was exciting to be on our own for an evening. We loved it so much, we would keep doing those trips even when the weather didn’t make for ideal boating weather. I remember one trip we made in early October. The water temperature was probably 50 degrees and the air temperature was probably not that far from there either. We got dropped off in the lake right after school and we boated until sunset. When the motor was running, you could seem steam rising off of the water jet of the motor. When it was running, you could hear the crowd at the football game at Irondale, which was only a couple of blocks from the lake. We loved it.