Sometimes a boat ramp is where you make it...

...


For many years we had used the dirt boat ramp in the little City Park about a hundred feet across the bayou from my house. This was a true “fisherman’s” boat ramp. It was not “built”, it was simply “created” over the years by neighborhood boats trying desperately to get to some water. Besides being a convenient place to launch from, it had also offered endless hours of amusement as we watched the comings and goings. The boat ramp was somewhat deceptive in that one’s boat was easily launched from there but rarely allowed one to escape without getting stuck. When I say, “stuck”, this may well be an understatement.


The boat ramp sloped off ever so gently into the water and just a few feet offshore dropped off about a foot. Since this bayou ties directly into the ship channel and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico, the water rises and falls with the tide. This makes it very difficult to determine exactly where the drop off is, and has caused many fisherman hours of grief as their vehicles are swallowed whole by the loose bayou sand. I myself have spent many hours digging out one vehicle and/or boat or another, mine, my brothers, friends, or just some hapless victim.


Alas, all good things must end, and one day somebody down at city hall who never used the little ramp simply decided that since they had no use for it, it ought to be closed. A city work crew showed up, and set about the task of planting six-inch diameter wooden posts in the ground, five feet apart, all across the front of the park, blocking off the little rutted road, shutting down the ramp, and putting up signs that violators would be fined. The signs add so much to the ambiance of the little park, and just like that a small piece of liberty was taken away by the government for our own good. Yes, it really can happen just that quickly. No muss, no fuss, nobody asked me, or anybody else apparently.


Anyway, this is not so much about the little boat ramp or about government restricting liberties as it is about what happened next. My brother panicked.


You see, for seventeen years, we had been able to launch our boats from the ramp. Oh sure, it was on the other side of the bayou, and we had to trailer the boats a couple of miles out and around to the other side, but it had always been there when we wanted it. Now it was simply gone. The nearest other ramp was some twelve miles away by road and a good 25 miles by water by way of the San Jacinto River, then the Houston Ship Channel, and then the bayou, back to the house. My brother decided this would never do.


My brother's boat is a 32 foot Well Craft with a Cutty cabin. He likes to work on the boat, polishing, cleaning, fixing, rigging and sometimes just sitting in it. After they closed the ramp I would often walk out of the house, and there he would be, just sitting in his boat, on the trailer in the driveway. He much preferred to just sit in his boat on the water though, and he tried trailering out to the other ramp for a while, but then one day he decided that we needed a boat ramp in the back yard.


I have to give my brother credit; a fellow much like my brother probably built the Panama Canal or some such place. This fellow would have decided to build the canal, set about the task of doing so without considering just how big a job this would eventually turn out to be, and without considering what the available technology was, nor how many people might have to die for accomplishing such a feat, simply grabbed a shovel and started digging. My brother hadn’t said anything about digging a boat ramp, no, he just climbed down out of his boat, picked up a pointy nosed shovel, walked down to the bayou, and started digging. Upon discovering him digging up my back yard, I simply smiled, told him to call me when he was ready to launch the boat (I didn’t want to miss the first launching), and then I disappeared for a week.


The ground on our side of the bayou is somewhat higher then on the park side. That’s the reason there’s a park there. A small creek runs down through the middle of the park that is located at the “low spot” in the neighborhood and is prone to flooding. Our side sits about seven to nine feet above the bayou, and the bank drops off sharply about 2 to 3 feet into the water. Once in the water the sides drop off at about a 45-degree angle to about 30 feet deep.




The sand on the bayou bank tends to be fairly hard packed on our side. When a shovel is plunged into it and removed the remaining sand just fluffs up, and you can pretty much watch as the hole that you just dug disappears as it fills back up with the fluffy stuff. I have always been somewhat amazed that to dig a hole say a foot square, and a foot deep, some 30 to 40 cubic yards of sand must be removed. My brother was about to discover this phenomenon. Just over a week later my brother called me at the shop and said the ramp was ready, and would I come and help him launch the boat.


“Sure”, I said, “I wouldn’t miss this for nothing”.


I was rather surprised that he was ready in only a week. By my estimate to dig a reasonably proper ramp for a 32 foot boat he would have removed and area of dirt approximately 3 feet deep at the waters edge and then slope it up to the nine foot level about 30 feet back, at minimum. This would have required the removal by tape measure of 1,350 cubic feet of dirt, more or less. However, this was fluff, remember? At roughly 35 cubic yards of fluff per cubic foot he would have shoveled something on the order of 47,250 cubic yards. I had to admit not a bad week’s worth of work with a shovel. Of course, you still wouldn’t want to back the trailer wheels into the water considering the 45-degree drop-off to 30-foot deep water.


When I arrived I was impressed. He had dug the ramp down to the water level of course, and sloped it up to the nine-foot level, however he had only dug it back about twenty feet. Maybe only 30,000 cubic yards of fluff, piled head high along both sides of the boat ramp. Still, quite an impressive feat. Standing at the top of the boat ramp I said, “Pretty steep ramp”.


“Yeah”, he said as he used a brush ax to chop out a stubborn root in the middle of the ramp, and then went to get the boat. He was determined this day to get to the water.


He had already hooked up his black, one ton, dually, diesel, Ford pickup to the Well Craft, and dropping it in gear he spun the big rig around in the drive and began backing across the wide side-yard toward the boat ramp. As the trailer wheels neared the crest of the ramp, just above where I was standing, my brother got out, and unhooked the bow strap, handed me the bowline and said, “Here, hold this”. He then got back in the truck and started backing down the ramp.


This is when things got exciting. As the trailer broke over the hump, and the weight shifted to the rear, my brother put his foot on the brake to slow things down. The ramp was so steep that the boat and trailer was now dragging the one ton dually pickup backwards at an ever-accelerating rate of speed. I watched in amazement, my head moving back and forth, trying to see and focus on the items that were passing before my very eyes in a blur only two feet in front of me. As the rear of the truck passed me by I reached out and placed both hands on the side of the bed as if trying to stop all this action.


At that exact moment, the right rear corner of the boat trailer dug into an exposed cypress stump at the corner of the ramp, and everything came to a sudden and unexpected halt in a cloud of dust. Everything except the boat. You remember the boat, a 32 foot Well Craft, with it’s bowline wrapped around my hand. The boat never slowed down. The boat continued to sail backwards at an alarming rate as I quickly took stock of just how much rope my own brother had given me to hang myself with.


The big Well Craft sailed off the trailer and landed in the water with a great KASPLOOSH! I in the mean-time had thrown the rope around a handy tree with a quick double half hitch, jumped back spreading my arms with lightning speed that any world class rodeo calf roper would have been proud of, and watched as the last of the line pealed itself off the bow. Thankfully there was enough line to bring the boat to a reasonably merciful halt in the water when it hit the end of its rope.


Checking to be sure I still had all my fingers, I fell out laughing, and shaking my brother’s hand I said, “Good job”.


He said, “Yeah, went better then I expected”.


Gridleak

 

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