About 10 years ago my wife and I were returning from a friends house in my 16 speedboat (150 HP), after a watching a Monday Night Football game. Now its early September at 11:30 PM, pitch black and we are buzzing along at 35-40 MPH, but I have the bridge lights in front of me. What could go wrong? Well the channel turns left ( i don't) and a low (4inches tall), hard mud island is right in front of me. Never saw it! All of a sudden I'm sliding across the wet grass at 35 MPH. The motor kicked up and I shut it down. We slid 75 feet from the water across that island. I had to pace off to see which side of the island had the closer water. My wife says "lets pick up the boat and put it back in". Yeah right, 1500# of boat and motor. Help was out of the question, no one is around that time of year, especially in the middle of the night, plus the embarassment would have finished me off! Well it took us three hours to get that boat back into the water. I wrapped my hands in a towel and grabbed the lower unit of the motor and "humped" the motor(and boat) over a foot at a time with my wife prying up the transom with a 2X4 we found. The bow was relatively easy to lift and slide on the wet grass. We "crabbed" that boat all the way back to the water and pushed it in. Needless to say we were very careful on the balance of that trip. Of course the fog rolled in on us, it got darker etc. Until we were just putting along looking for the dock. We finally got home about 4AM, had a drink, took some aspirin and went to bed!
