• "Right of Spring - A North Country Tradition Part II" ""

• An interview with Bruce Hill, Skipper of "Golden Dazy"

Right of Spring
A North Country - Tradition Part II:

By HARBOR WATCH Editor Mark Gardner

ow my dad never yelled "yashuda", he was the silent type. He'd just stared at me with "the look", you know the one that makes you crawl up inside your baseball ball cap and wish you'd been born to the family next door, the family with enough kids that you could always transfer the blame to someone else.

I remember the spring ritual well.

The old Briggs and Stratton had a pull cord starter, yes I mean a pull cord. A rope about 3 feet long, with a wooden handle on one end and a knot on the other. You'd wrap it around the top of the crankshaft and yank for all it was worth. The engine shut off was a spring loaded ground lever that you pushed against the top of the spark plug, and if you were lucky, you didn't get shocked or burned in the process.

The tools of spring were simple, a book of matches, a can of gasoline, a pressurized torch and a crescent wrench. After 68 pulls on the cord, the old engine would pop once and the telltale puff of black smoke assured you that the damn thing was flooded. Using the crescent wrench to remove the plug, you fired up the torch, which although I don't remember what it used for fuel worked about as well as the Briggs and Stratton started in the spring, but that's another story, and heated the spark plug.

Now the trick was how to get the spark plug, which was now glowing red, back into the engine before it cooled off, after all, this was the dark ages... you know the time before the socket set with a spark plug wrench. A few choice words spoken in pain, having assured my dad that this was the first & last time I'd ever spoken them, the spark plug installed, the cord careful wrapped around the top of the engine and one mighty pull later.... I was about half finished with the lawn and I remembered that I had baseball practice in 10 minutes and I stopped the mower grabbed my glove and ran off to practice. Dad finished the lawn.... I struck out my four times at bat and came home and decided that sailing lessons might not be so boring after all.

If nothing else, the rights of spring are consistent. As goes the lawnmower so goes the outboard. Although it ran without a hitch in the fall, it had all winter to sit there and literally stew in it's own juices. This year bring the spark plug wrench, propane torch and matches just in case. It's not a cure for proper maintenance, but it might be the thing that gets you off the dock.