Firstly, finding a 14′ jon boat for a resonable price wasn’t as easy as we thought. It seems that everyone wants to get rid of their 10′ or 12′ but not the 14′s. We did find what we were looking for eventually and luckily it was only a few miles from my house. Let me just say that picking up (literally lifting the damn thing) a 14′ aluminum boat in the middle of the winter when its full of ice and leaves and stuffing it in the back of an S-10 sucked. It was cold as hell and that boat must have weighed and extra 100 pounds with all that crap in it. I never imagined it could be that heavy but then again, I’m about 6′-1″ and 160 lbs WITH waders on and guy that I bought it from was even punier than I am. Believe it or not, at my size, I have been called a “puss” before.  Never the less, on my way home I hit the DIY carwash tipped the thing half out of the bed of the truck so it would drain and powerwashed most of the ice and leaves out then called a buddy to help load the thing into my garage when I got home. The next day I walked out to discover that the powerwash job, while effective in removing all that shit from the visible parts of the boat’s interior, had released one of the most “interesting” smells I have ever been exposed to. It was as if the seats had been acting as the freezers for a cryogenics experiment gone horribly wrong. I sort of felt like I had just single handedly destroyed someone’s life long science experiment that was hidden away under the seats of this vessel. It was pretty nasty but at the same time, in the dead of winter when nothing outside has a smell other than the smell of cold, there was something kind of comforting about it. It smelled like years upon years of decaying earth and animal matter but it was concentrated in my little 20×20 garage. Kind of like when you fart in a cup and then cap it with your hand to pass it to your buddy. I have never done that by the way… only a victim.

Since the boat was closest to me, I went to pick it up and I was trusted to make the right decision. (Did I mention that this project was a partnership deal? You see, this is what you do when you can’t afford your own boat. Find a willing partner and split everything. Just make sure its one of your favorite people to fish with so you never have to argue about who takes it where and when.) Anyway, as sweet as it was, that stench made me wonder if I had made the right decision. After getting together with my new co-owner and getting all excited about our possibilities with this thing my worries went away in a hurry. Here’s what we came up with for our blank canvas.

She’s a real beauty eh? 14′ Ouchita jon boat circa 1972. 48″ beam and 36″ bottom. The beam and bottom dimensions are important. They played a major factor in altering our original plan to deck almost the entire boat. It would seem that 36″ bottoms and a raised center of gravity aren’t a marriage made in heaven. Here is a little picture story of how this boat evolved.

“Holy shit. If this thing is tippy now, wait until we go up another 6 inches with the decks!”

So we were on to a plan B. Rear seat removal to maximize interior space.

Since we removed the seat that contained half of the flotation for the boat, we replaced it with pink foam and then a sheet of 1/4 ply.

Then it was off to the metal shop to get the anchor system fabbed up.

And then on to the paint shop and presto…

$700 drift boat and trailer.  That’s the grand total minus the beers. You really can’t beat it… or so we thought. There is a whole other side to this story that involves a few more boats… deals to good to be true, boat theft and so on… I’ll pick that up later but for now here’s the rest on this one.

You can see the anchor set up in the pic below. Lead to the rower’s side.  Also, if you look to the back of the boat (which is actually the front if your floating downstream) you can see the leaning brace we came up with. Basically what we did was bend galvanized steel tubing  in a few directions and came up with a bracket that they will slide in and out of easily for transport. There are leaning braces at both ends so you have two angler capability in addition to a rower.

The funny and sad part of this whole story is that the two of us that own it have only fished from it once so far. Like I said, there are now a few more boats. One of which is for sale by the way. Shoot us an email and we’ll tell you all about it.

Here we are up on the Au Sable for the ASBWPA Fall Clean Up in Mio, MI. We played garbage barge for the Trophy Water stretch between the Mio boat launch and Comin’s Flats. I think we had a grand total of 13 bags betwen what we collected on our own and bags we picked up from other crew members doing foot duty. The pontoon on the right is the second installment to the armada and part of the “deals to good to be true story”. Its also the one for sale. Best part of the clean up story beyond all the trash we collected? The jon boat got its name while the owners were spotting the truck. It was dubbed, very non-politically correctly but very fitting, THE SHORTBUS.