It’s not much to look at, or sit in really. About 8 feet long, leaky, and unevenly faded by decades in the sun—it’s my version of a power boat—a rubber raft that washed up on a Nantucket beach some time during the Reagan Administration. After rescuing the raft from my father-in-law’s garage, I pumped it up, checked for holes, and dropped it in a pond to check its “seaworthiness.” I christened the raft “Uncle Albert” for no other reason than it sounds about as odd as the boat looks. Uncle Albert has a plywood deck fitted together in three pieces, a wooden stern to which I have painstakingly mounted a cup holder, and two splintered oars that are clearly original to the raft. With its undersized 9.8 horsepower motor, it’s a little short on giddy-up, but it gets around okay and it floats. In fact, Uncle Albert is pretty much all I need in a powerboat.

What Uncle Albert lacks in speed and appearance, he makes up for in function. Drawing a mere four inches of water, I can take it just about anywhere wet—sand and shoals, mussel bars—no problem. If I do run aground (and I do), I hop out and drag it to deeper waters-the snakehead fish* of power boats. Pretty much anywhere a canoe or kayak can launch, I can drop in old Uncle Albert. Can you do that Mr. Boston Whaler, Mr. Sea U Later II? I don’t think so.

A raft like Uncle Albert won’t win you any prestige. I would not recommend launching it at one of the larger deep-water boat ramps on a sunny Saturday afternoon. Children may laugh and call it a “starter yacht” or ask which mooring your “big boy boat” is on. “Someday, you’ll have a real rig,” their fathers will say, invoking the testosterone-laden term of endearment reserved for a much larger vessel. And yes, Captain Obvious, Uncle Albert probably was once a dinghy. But how long did it take you to hook that twin engine leviathan to the back of your Suburban? Can you take that ocean liner out after work on an outgoing tide? Can you smell the salt air with all that exhaust in your face? Again, I think not.

On one of the aforementioned sunny Saturday afternoons, I put Uncle Albert in at the Joppa Flats boat ramp at the mouth of the Merrimack River. If you’ve been to Joppa Flats, you know that you have about two hours on either side of high tide to do anything requiring water, and the rest of the time its acres of mud flats that only a dirty little clam could love. On this particular day, I was armed only with my fly rod and some SPF 30. I put in soon after high tide, leaving me just a little time to poke around for bass and bluefish as the water began to drain from the flats.

I soon spotted a flotilla of, you guessed it, Boston Whalers, in deeper waters. They were packed tightly around a flock of diving terns, a clear sign that there were fish feeding near the surface. As I moved closer I could make out a number of fly rods lashing at the air as they guided their line to breaking fish, while still others were bent in an arc as fish jerked and pulled their flies to deeper water. A few gratified anglers bent over their stainless steel rails to release small (but fun) “schoolie” bass.

I moved within sneering distance of this seemingly exclusive club, wondering how I might squeeze into the middle of the pack when “WHAM!” a big striper smacked the water in the distance, getting my attention and the attention of my fellow anglers. Faster than you can say “Grady White,” 10-and-a-half boats turned in the direction of the tail slap, creeping up on the center of the fading ripples and listening for further direction. There it is: WHAM! And the fish gives away its location and course. We all alter our approach accordingly...but wait a second, what’s that fellas? Is that a mussel bar I see just below the surface? Looks like it could be a little hairy for a larger vessel, even for the shallow draft of the Whaler. We’re all creeping up on shallow waters that are getting shallower by the second, as the falling tide sucks seaward through the mouth of the Merrimack. I continue to advance as my depth challenged counterparts begin to back off.

You can see by now where this little vignette is going, and I won’t bore you with the self-indulgent details. But what followed was truly a fantastic struggle between man and beast. With an artful cast, I dropped a Clauser Minnow inches in from of the cruising fish. Initiating a battle that would echo on…

Ahem. Where was I? As the fleet of boat captains looked on, confined to deeper waters, I boated the fish, a 33-inch striped bass, and slowly motored back to the Joppa Flats ramp.

I like to imagine a group of admiring anglers tracing my slow route back to the boat ramp and wishing aloud for a boat like Uncle Albert. On reaching the ramp, I propped up the motor and dragged the raft to dry pavement, a few feet above the waterline. As I loaded the fish into a long vacant cooler I’d retrieved from the back of my car, I earned the attention of a few kayakers coming in for the day. As I lifted the fish again, as if to reposition it in the cooler, one of them called out “Hey, that’s a pretty nice fish.” Another looked back over the shallow water as the mud flats started to emerge and offered, “That’s a handy little rig.” And with that, the brief but exceptional day on the water came to a gratifying end.

So you might be thinking, “There’s no way that guy would choose to have a little rubber raft over a real power boat.” Well, you’d be absolutely right. But for now, Uncle Albert will do just fine. When he finally is retired (probably very soon), I’ll think of him fondly as I strain to winch my Boston Whaler up a crowded boat ramp on a Saturday afternoon.

Photograph by Jay Baker