Today, I started work as usual, and before I could steep my first cup of coffee, I got a call from my friend Gordon asking if I wanted to blow off work and spend the day in the marsh on an air-boat. Hmmm, let me see…. YES! So exactly one hour after the call, I was in his truck hauling a 17ft 650 hp air-boat to St John’s Lake for one of the coolest days I’ve spent outside in Florida to date!

It was a fantastic day to be on the water… The sun was warm, but the air was a little chilly at speed. When we got there, we met up with two other boats: Flip and Phil in one, Lawrence and Will in the other.

Launching was unlike any boat launch I’ve ever experienced. Gordon unchained the boat and put the rig in reverse, then braked hard to let the flat bottom vessel fly off the trailer to the ground… Launched.

The ride was great… I’ve been on a few air-boats in my past but never like this… This time it was so much more organic… More about the need for the boat than a showcase of the boat. It was an amazing day of twisties that would make any motorcycle fanatic drool.

Once we hit our first destination, we started the very strenuous and involved process of cat fishing…

Or as Will corrected “cat fish fishing”…. It’s hard to argue with 9 year old logic. There we hung out for a few hours and caught some monsters

And some tossable panfish

All and all, it was a good day! There was some serious care taken in the attention to detail in these boats, by the way…

notice the 8 ball shifter on the tiller… Very nice, Flip. They were also some pretty high end boats… Powered by airplane engines,

the two smallers ones were light and nimble. In the end, we had an OK load of cats…

So we processed them onsite, which was, on it’s own, an adventure…

Then headed out for another burn around the water (or mud, or dry land, or whatever) It was amazing…

When we had our full, just drove back up on the land for 50 yards, and then right up on the trailer… Loading from the water took about 45 seconds.

Not a bad Friday at all.