Wonderful Time With Pontoon Boat Seats
† Tuesday, February 15th, 2011Some friends and I just visited the Muskoka region of Ontario, where an old college friend (Jerod) recently had a second hand motorboat from a retiring Quebecois couple. He’d promised some of us a nice weekend on the water, on the agreement that we help get this secondhand boat seaworthy.
This was, however, a bit of a challenge. Most of the paint on the hull was rusty, the engine was in serious need of a tune-up, and the pontoon seats were flaky and frayed. It wasn’t quite the weekend of relaxation we’d been looking to, but it was a fun (or at least entertaining) one nevertheless.
It began with a half-dozen stops at nearby hardware, boating and home decoration stores, haphazardly picking up the components we required to get the “Rose of Conakry” (as Jerod had named her) shipshape once more. To my wonder, the pontoon seats proved to be the most difficult to spruce up.
While most of the hardware problems could be solved using either some oil or a reluctantly-purchased substitution part, the pontoon seats were strongly fused into the boat itself, making it difficult to replace with removing a substantial part of the furnishings.
Our first attempts to patch them together with transparent tape and adhesive proved unsuccessful – we made the pontoon boat seat similar of Frankenstein’s monster. Conversely, we ended up just ripping out almost all the fabric, and replacing it using some off-white material we’d chemically treated for water damage.
Sadly, the “Rose of Conakry” will never get the fresh-off-the-line charm it must have had years ago, but I almost like it this way, it seems rugged, lived in. Around Sunday evening we ultimately were able to take the “Rose” out onto the river, where we spent a couple of hours of kicking back beers and waiting for the fish.