My wife Samantha and I own a 23’ Pro-Line Sport/Fishing boat that we keep at a marina in Panacea, Florida, located up in the curve of the panhandle. It’s home to some great fishing and it’s only about two hours from our home in South Georgia — easy day trip!
One day, we decided to run around Alligator Point and head to Dog Island Reef. We had never fished there and I wanted to know how long of a trip it would be for our boat. We made the trip just fine and fished with some limited access. After a couple of hours, we were ready to move to another spot, but the battery didn’t have enough power to start the engine!
We had this problem the last time we used the boat, but it had been many weeks since we had used the boat before that, so I made sure to have the marina charge the battery before we departed. Obviously, something else was wrong. We were at anchor, in no danger, but it was 2:00 in the afternoon. I called SeaTow, a service similar to AAA but for watercraft. They were busy with a couple of issues and said they would get back to me when they had an ETA.
We kept fishing and saw some really cool stuff: porpoise, turtles, a huge tiger shark, at least seven feet long, and a manta ray that jumped out of the water three times! But I was a little worried about the time. At 3:30, I got a call from SeaTow saying a boat was on its way to my location, but the estimated time to my position was 90 minutes. Yikes! That would put them at our position at 5:00 and sunset was at 5:40. While there would be some residual light, it was going to be tight to make the one-hour trip back to Panacea before dark.
In the 90 minutes that passed, Samantha and I talked about our options. Would we have to stay out on the reef for that night? We had a blanket and some light jackets, and food and drinks in the cooler. We examined some options on the coast. Could we run over to Lanark Village and dock there for the night? What would we do in the morning if we still couldn’t start the engine? We watched the sun get lower and lower in the sky. At 5:05, SeaTow found us and in less than five minutes, we had a jump-start and the engine was running. We had to do a little paperwork, so it was 5:15 by the time we took off. We decided to make a run for it at top speed.
At 6:01, with the last remaining rays of light, we came into Rock Landing Marina. We had made it in 45 minutes and were able to get everything stowed away and headed home by 7:00. So all’s well that ends well, right? Well, wait a minute. If I knew that I had previously had a problem with the battery, why make the choice to take such a long trip away from our home base? We had talked about getting a portable battery jump device in case we had that issue again, but we didn’t get one before this last trip. All in all, not very grounded behavior on my part. Needless to say, we will have our backup battery on board before the next trip and the mechanic will check out the electrical system and determine what is creating the drain on the battery.
The key to making grounded decisions is looking at all of the negative possibilities before executing the plan, and making good decisions based on potential bad things that can happen. My poor decision-making nearly cost us a night out on the water. In this case, not the end of the world. But consistently making good decisions is important because you can’t always tell when a bad decision may have much more costly results. Lesson learned.
…And it wasn’t all bad. We saw this amazing sunset!
David is an international speaker, executive coach, serial entrepreneur, and shipwreck survivor. He is the bestselling author of Grounded (Little River, 2016) . If you’re interested in David’s expertise in the areas of leadership, finance, and public speaking, please get in touch here.