For the last three months when I wasn’t off riding my old Yamaha, I’ve been helping my old buddy Cornbread with the construction of a fine new magnum duck blind. We’ve been wanting one that floats and have been on the lookout for a pontoon boat shell for years. Well we finally located some pontoons and set about to build a blind big enough to be comfortable in, while being sea-worthy enough to hold up to the rough winter waters of the Tennessee River. The floats are 22 feet long and the frame is made of 2x6s with aluminum sheeting for walls. I finished putting the roof on the attached boat “garage” Sunday evening, just as the sun went down. We had it sitting on a flatbed trailer, ready to launch next weekend when Monday’s storm blew through town.
As you can see, the weight of the thing shifted a little. Fact is, it apparently went completely airborne, inverted in flight, before landing square on its roof. Unbelievable. This monster weighs more that a 1953 model four-door Buick and with (I thought) absolutely no aerodynamic qualities. What’s really amazing is the fact that I can’t find a dent in it anywhere! It’s just, er…. a little faulty in its orientation.
Fortunately, there was nothing else damaged on the place. Actually, I saw nothing wrecked (to amount to anything) in the whole area. The boy asked me how the wind could have done that without tearing through everything else around there. I told him it must have been like those missiles shot down through the mouth of chimneys by FA-18s in Iraq, a real surgical strike. Man, I got to start living right.
