Wonderful Time With Pontoon Seats
Thursday, February 17th, 2011A couple of friends and I just headed up to the Muskoka region of Ontario, where an old college mate (Jerod) recently bought a second-hand motorboat from a retiring Quebecois couple. He’d promised a few us a nice weekend at the lake, on the agreement that we help make this secondhand boat seaworthy.
This was, however, a bit of a challenge. Most of the paint on the hull was rusty, the engine was in urgent need of a tune-up, and the pontoon seats were peeling and frayed. It wasn’t quite the weekend of enjoyment we’d been looking to, but it was an exciting (or at a minimum entertaining) one nevertheless.
It began with a half-dozen stops at local hardware, boating and home remodeling shops, haphazardly gathering the materials we required to make the “Rose of Conakry” (as Jerod had dubbed her) shipshape once more. To my surprise, the pontoon boat seats proved to be the most difficult to spruce up.
While the majority of the hardware problems could be fixed with either some oil or a reluctantly-purchased substitution part, the pontoon seats were effectively fused into the boat itself, making it unlikely to replace with removing a considerable part of the furnishings.
Our early attempts to fix them together with transparent tape and adhesive proved unsuccessful – we made the pontoon boat seat equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. Rather, we ended up just ripping out almost all the fabric, and substituting it with some off-white material we’d chemically treated for water damage.
Regrettably, the “Rose of Conakry” will never possess the fresh-off-the-line charm it must’ve had before, but I surely prefer it this way, it appears robust, lived in. Around Sunday evening we ultimately managed to take the “Rose” out onto the lake, where we spent a few hours of kicking back beers and watching for the fish.