Some friends and I lately headed up to the Muskoka region of Ontario, where an old college mate (Jerod) recently bought a second hand motorboat from a retiring Quebecois couple. He'd promised a few us a beautiful weekend on the water, on the agreement that we help get this secondhand watercraft seaworthy.
This was, however, a bit of challenging. Most of the paint on the hull was rusty, the engine was in dire need of a tune-up, and the pontoon seats were peeling and frayed. It wasn't quite the weekend of pleasure we'd been looking to, but it was an exciting (or at least interesting) one nevertheless.
It started off with a half-dozen stops at nearby hardware, boating and home remodeling stores, randomly collecting the materials we required to get the "Rose of Conakry" (as Jerod had dubbed her) shipshape again. To my surprise, the pontoon seats proved to be the toughest to spruce up.
While many of the mechanical problems could be remedied using either some oil or a reluctantly-purchased replacement part, the pontoon seats were powerfully fused into the boat itself, making it unlikely to replace with removing a significant part of the furnishings.
Our initial efforts to fix them together with transparent tape and glue yielded unsuccessful - we created the pontoon boat seat equivalent of Frankenstein's monster. Instead, we ended up just ripping out almost all the fabric, and replacing it using some off-white material we'd chemically treated for water damage.
Sadly, the "Rose of Conakry" will never possess the fresh-off-the-line charm it must have had before, but I surely like it this way, it seems robust, lived in. Around Sunday evening we lastly managed to take the "Rose" out onto the river, where we enjoyed a couple of hours of kicking back beers and watching for the fish.