Nice Time With Pontoon Boat Seats

Some friends and I lately headed up to the Muskoka region of Ontario, where an old college friend (Jerod) recently bought a second-hand motorboat from a retiring Quebecois couple. He'd promised a few us a nice weekend on the water, on the condition that we help get this previously-enjoyed motorboat seaworthy.

This was, however, a bit of challenging. Most of the paint on the hull was rusty, the engine was in serious need of a tune-up, and the pontoon seats were peeling and frayed. It wasn't quite the weekend of relaxation we'd been planning to, but it was a fun (or at a minimum entertaining) one nevertheless.

It began with a half-dozen stops at local hardware, boating and home decoration stores, haphazardly collecting the materials we needed to get the "Rose of Conakry" (as Jerod had named her) shipshape again. To my surprise, the pontoon boat seats proved to be the most difficult to spruce up.

While many of the hardware problems could be remedied using either a bit of oil or a reluctantly-purchased substitution part, the pontoon seats were effectively fused into the boat itself, rendering it unlikely to replace with disposing of a significant part of the furnishings.

Our initial efforts to fix them together with transparent tape and adhesive proved unsuccessful - we made the pontoon boat seat equivalent of Frankenstein's monster. Instead, we ended up just ripping out most of the fabric, and replacing it using some off-white material we'd chemically treated for water damage.

Unfortunately, the "Rose of Conakry" will never possess the fresh-off-the-line appeal it must have had years ago, but I almost prefer it this way, it appears robust, lived in. Around Sunday afternoon we finally were able to take the "Rose" out onto the river, where we enjoyed a couple of hours of kicking back beers and watching for the fish.