James Etheridge

I spent a lot of time on the Lake Lanier throughout my twenties and early thirties, and I didn’t even own a boat. I was able to experience Lake Life thanks to my friends Doug, Deb and Destry Holmes and the generosity of their parents. Mr. and Mrs. Holmes bought a houseboat in 1978, an intracoastal boat with a high hull to withstand high water. Not that there was much high water to worry about on Lake Lanier, but I digress. The boat was completely fiberglass, thirty-six feet long and, as Destry put it, “a constant project.” Initially it was in need of a lot of attention and after about a year of work she was seaworthy, christened the Barbara Ann after Mrs. Holmes. I don’t know how much money was put into the Barbara Ann, but I do know that she definitely got a lot of good use over the years. She had some pretty unique features of the time, including hot water that was heated from running the engine, which meant hot showers. She had a one hundred gallon gas tank, a one hundred gallon water tank and was powered by a 350 V-8 which was plenty for a boat her size, even with a full crew of young, trim, buff and shapely twenty-somethings.

Mr. and Mrs. Holmes were generous enough to let Doug, Deb, Destry and a host of their friends use the houseboat whenever it was available. We guests would kick in for the gas, food and refreshments as well as help with the packing away and cleaning when it was time to head back ashore. Many a Fourth of July, Memorial Day and other summer weekends were spent aboard her, anchored in a cove, floating in inner tubes, fishing off the deck and lots of skiing behind the Holmes’ Glaspar ski boat.

After a few years, Doug purchased a Kawasaki Jet Ski. It was one of the original types that you rode standing up, unlike the Wave Runners of today, which feature a seat, handlebars and are ridden like a motor bike. It was a previous year’s model that was, for all intents and purposes, brand new because it had sat in the Decatur Kawasaki showroom for a couple of years before Doug bought it. The Jet Ski pretty much replaced water skiing behind the runabout. The problem was getting the ski from the trailer to the houseboat. At first Doug tried towing it behind Barbara Ann, which wasn’t a good idea because the ski started rolling and almost sank. After that we tried hoisting it onto the front deck of the houseboat, which worked fine except for the fact that the ski weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds and, while standing in the water, we had to lift it over our heads to get it on the deck. Mr. Holmes eventually built outriggers and installed them on Barbara Ann’s stern to lift and lower the ski in and out of the water. That made things considerably easier.

I got spoiled on the Jet Ski. The difference in riding it and skiing behind a boat was the absence of the pull of the rope on your arms and shoulders. While it is true that on the Jet Ski you had to control the throttle to compensate for the waves and ride them with the handle, there was still no tug from the boat. After not riding a pair of water skis for years, I went skiing one Sunday with a friend from work who had just bought a new boat. I skied three times. Each time felt like a half-hour, but in reality I was probably up only about five minutes apiece. The next morning I woke up and felt like I had been beaten with a baseball bat. My shoulders were killing me, I could barely move my hands and arms, my legs and hips felt like they were on fire. At work it was all I could do to get out of my chair and walk to the copier. That was the last time I ever skied behind a boat.

Doug, my late wife Marie and I spent the Fourth of July on the Barbara Ann one year when the holiday happened to fall on a Saturday. We went up on Friday afternoon and spent the night on the houseboat. Our friends Chip and Ann were coming up the next morning so we stayed in the slip instead of going to our usual cove. We woke the next morning to the sound of Hank Williams music playing loudly. Not Hank Jr., but his daddy, Hank Sr. singing Lovesick Blues, Your Cheatin’ Heart, the whole bit. It was coming from a boat in a slip across from us where there was a guy laying on his couch and drinking tall Budweisers. This was about eight-thirty in the morning. All the while we were preparing the boat for the weekend, Hank kept singing and he kept reclining and drinking, until eventually there were about eight or ten empty cans on the table in front of him. “That poor bastard,” I said to Doug. “His wife’s probably left him and taken everything he’s got except for his boat.” “Yeah,” said Doug, “and he’s probably getting ready to lose that.” A few minutes later disaster struck. Doug was getting ready to go to his truck in the parking lot and had a big ring of keys in his hand. All of a sudden he dropped the keys and they fell into the lake beside the walkway next to the slip. “Oh, no,” he said. “No, no, no! That ring’s got my truck keys, house keys and a bunch of work keys on it.” There was little we could do, so Doug decided to call our friend Todd, who had scuba gear, to see if he could come up, dive and try to find the keys. Keep in mind, this is the morning of the Fourth of July. Hank Williams kept singing in the background. A man from a boat a few slips over walked up and asked us what was going on. “I dropped my key ring in the lake, right off the walkway,” said Doug. “Did you drop them straight down?” asked the man.
“Yes.”
“Hold on just a second.”
He went to his boat and came back with a length of nylon rope tied to a big piece of iron. “This is a strong magnet,” he said. “Let it go straight down to the bottom, about where you dropped them, then pull it up a little. Move it around, but not too quick. If you feel a bump on the rope, it’s picked up something.” Doug lowered the magnet into the water, pulled it up slightly, moved it once and said, “There. I felt something.” He brought the magnet up and attached to the bottom was his ring of keys.” We all cheered. Doug tried to give the man twenty dollars but he wouldn’t take it. After that he had two spare truck keys and house keys made. He used one set to get to and from the lake and stashed the other set inside Barbara Ann. The big ring of keys stayed home.

That night when sleeping quarters were decided, Doug slept on the convertible sofa, Chip and Ann slept in the double bed in the bedroom while Marie and I made a palette and slept under the stars on the top deck. While that may sound peaceful and spiritually uplifting, it was actually quite the opposite. The top deck of the Barbara Ann was in fact a thick fiberglass roof covered in an artificial turf rug with no padding under it. In spite of a three-inch thick foam rubber mattress covered with two sleeping bags one on top of another, it was still like sleeping on a concrete bench. Not to mention that you were awakened early in the morning by the sun, heat and various flying insects indigenous to the woods surrounding Lake Lanier. “We’re sleeping up top tonight,” Chip told me when we went down to shower. “Fine,” I told him. “Have at it, it’s all yours.” We were all too eager to swap the view of the moon and the stars for the comfort of a ceiling and a double bed with a mattress.

On another Fourth a few years later, I learned a lesson on the dangers of fireworks. There are always safety warnings on fireworks, but we always figured those were for idiots or people who weren’t in their twenties and didn’t know everything. We were shooting big bottle rockets off the top deck of the boat out of a glass one-liter Coke bottle. One of them didn’t fire and was an obvious dud. I bent down and picked the rocket up out of the bottle. It wasn’t a dud, detonated and flew off across the cove, spinning and spewing before diving into the water. I looked down at my hand. It was black and burned like the dickens. Did we go ashore to the urgent care center? Not a chance. I sat down on a chaise lounge and stuck my hand in the big Igloo cooler, which was full of half-melted ice and freezing cold water. I sat there with my hand submerged until after midnight and when I woke up the next morning, my hand was intact and working, no blisters or burns. I knew I was stupid and I knew I was lucky, but I learned never to pick up a bottle rocket once the fuse had been lit.

Doug and I spent a week on board the Barbara Ann one summer. Marie, our daughter Dana, Doug and I went up for a weekend. Marie and Dana went back home for the week, leaving us two guys on the lake unsupervised. They then came back up the following weekend. It was a relaxing and fun week of bachelor living on the lake. We would get up in the morning, eat breakfast, take care of whatever needed to be done on board and then spend the rest of the day enjoying Lake Life. If we needed to go pick up supplies, empty the trash or get gas for the Jet Ski, we would climb in the Glaspar and head to the mainland. The basic idea was fun in the sun and the consumption of a goodly amount of beer.

One thing about anchoring the Barbara Ann in the cove was as soon as we dropped anchor, two or three big carp would swim up and camp out under the boat for as long as we were there. I guess the water under there was cooler and there was an element of protection, although I can’t imagine what in or on the lake would want to mess with a carp. Along with the carp came huge schools of bream and they stayed under and around the boat the whole time. At one point Marie came out of the boat with band-aids covering the moles on her back to keep the bream from coming up and nibbling on them while she was floating in one of the inner tubes. The band-aids made it look like she had been shot in the back with rock salt.

Every day Doug and I would fish for the bream under the boat, using pink worms and bread if we ran out of worms. There wasn’t much sport to it, but it was fun catching them and throwing them back. We would take turns riding the Jet Ski, sometimes on long excursions, other times we would time each other to see who could make it around the island the fastest. We would sit on the top deck after lunch and then come in and listen to the ship-to-shore radio. That was in the days long before cell phones, so ship-to-shore was how you communicated with other boats and the mainland. The only thing was that people could listen in, kind of like a party line, so you had to be careful what you said. Some people weren’t so careful though. One day we landed on some guy ashore calling his buddy on the lake and the conversation went something like this:
“Hey, man, howzit goin’?”
“Great, old buddy! Just up here takin’ it easy.”
“Well, what’re you doin’?”
“Well, I bought us a case o’ that there ah-stay-spoo-mon-tay an’ we been drinkin’ on that all week.”
“Are y’workin’ on y’boat any?”
“Work? What’re you talkin’ about? You know I don’t do but three things when I come up here an’ that’s sit on my butt, drink beer an’ fish!”
Doug and I were doubled over laughing and decided the next time we went for supplies, we’d get us a bottle of that there ah-stay-spoo-mon-tay. We never did. Then it was time for one of our other daily activities, watching The Three Stooges. They came on at 3:05 p.m. on TBS. One of the episodes we watched that week is attached to this blog.

I was on the bow patio one afternoon, cleaning the grill and Doug was below looking for something in the storage closet next to the bathroom. “Ah, ha, look at this!” he called out. I went down and he was standing there holding a big, half-full bottle of Seagram’s V.O. whisky. “Dad told Mom he’d quit drinking liquor. Looks like we found his stash!”
“What are we gonna do with it?”
“We’re gonna drink it! What’s he gonna do, rat me out to Mom about it?”
We took the bottle up on the top deck and mixed drinks with ice cold ginger ales from the big cooler. That was probably one of the best Seagram’s and ginger ale I ever had. That evening I took a picture of the sunset from the top deck and painted it in oil on canvas later on that winter, when the sun and the water were far out of reach. It’s still hanging in my studio today.

Marie and Dana picked us up the following Saturday and after the weekend on the boat, it was back to reality. The funny thing was I had sea legs for a few days, from a week in the cove aboard the Barbara Ann. The second day home, Tuesday morning, I was in the shower and I felt the boat rocking. All of a sudden I lost my balance and fell. Marie came running in. “What just happened?” she yelled. “Are you okay?” “I’m fine,” I laughed sheepishly. “The boat just pitched a little to the right and I went down.”

In the late Eighties Mr. Holmes sold the Barbara Ann. He found a much larger boat, fifty-three feet long, all steel with twin 350 engines, a flying bridge, a full galley and air conditioning. It was more like a house than a boat. We took it out a number of times and it was great, very luxurious, but they only kept it for a few years. Mrs. Holmes began to have issues on the water and every time she went out on the boat, she would become seasick. Hence, when she and Mr. Holmes would go to the lake, Mrs. Holmes would want to stay in the slip with the air conditioner plugged up and the boat sitting still. The last summer I think the only time the boat was taken out was when Doug, Deb or Destry took her out. After that Mr. Holmes sold the boat. They bought a condo at Gulf Highlands in Panama City Beach and Mr. and Mrs. Holmes were good enough to share it with family and friends. We had many great times there, as you always will in PC, but the days of the Barbara Ann on Lake Lanier were special. They were the days of carefree youth and exuberance. They were times that we were lucky to have and I am thankful not only for that, but also for the graciousness and generosity of a wonderful family, wonderful people and wonderful friends. The Barbara Ann. The memories are there. They always will be.

Note: A special thanks to Destry Holmes for his help with information and photographs.  – J.