My father-in-law has had a run of bad luck with his boat and motor. He is an inveterate fisherman, and his rig of choice was an old 14 ft. aluminum boat with a 10 horse outboard. 

Not fancy, but it provided much pleasure for him and multiple generations of offspring that accompanied him on his fishing excursions.

Last year, a thief made off with the outboard motor, requiring him to acquire a replacement. An even greater disaster struck last fall when he was rear ended at a stoplight, totaling the boat, motor and trailer.

A trip to his favorite marine store this spring found him a dandy used setup, a 16 ft. aluminum beauty with a 50 horse tiller steer four stroke, nicely upholstered and set up with a live well and electric trolling motor.  He was enjoying it mightily, but then a mini-disaster hit.  The new boat sprung a leak.

It happened at the annual family outing so he asked for my assistance to help find the leak. I went down to the dock with him, and after a bit of examination, lifted an access lid at the transom and could see that the intake tube for the live well pump displayed a sizeable spurt which was the source of the water ingress. I pointed it out to him, but it was not easily accessible for repair, especially while still in the water. The decision was made to pull the boat after the afternoon fish.

I was assigned to drive the pickup and trailer to the public access, and once the boat was out of the water, he cinched it down with a pair of straps, then brought out the outboard motor lower unit support, a curved steel tube with a half twist bar on the lower end and a U-shaped holder with a rubber pad on the upper end. He jammed the lower end into the round plastic live well intake and proceeded to show us how to prop the lower unit on the upper end rubber pad and bungee it tight. 

I mentioned that the intake probably wasn’t the best spot to shove the lower end of the support, but he was adamant that that was where it belonged because the marine shop had showed him how to do it. 

I dropped the argument for the time being. We drove back to the cabin, where I did some online research on that brand of lower unit support. I found the part in their online catalog, then looked through the supplied photos. I could see that the half twist bar on the lower end of the support was supposed to fit into a slot on a supplied plate that was to be attached to the trailer cross-tube.  

I went out to the boat, and sure enough, there was the slotted plate mounted in the recommended location. I went back in, hailed my father-in-law and brought him back out to show him the slotted plate. It took a few minutes for us to correct the situation, and he sheepishly brought it in to the dealer to have the live well intake tube replaced to fix his leak the next Monday. 

Misconceptions are hard to deal with and are often damaging. Leftist educators have been telling students for decades that socialism is a good thing, ignoring the evidence that states otherwise. The current occupant of the White House has been emulating Venezuela in implementing socialist policies and conducting search and seizures on his political opponents. The Walz administration is better known for harassing business owners than protecting honest citizens from riots and burning.

For my father-in-law, it was an honest mistake. In the case of Biden and Walz, it is intentional, a systematic attack on a free people. Resist with all you have, or you will lose your freedoms.

Rob Crowe is a northern Minnesota conservative Republican writer, one of the few known to exist ... 

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