My dad’s boat was a sixteen-foot aluminum Lund, older than me, named “Katie’s Catch,” after me. He bought the trailer the year I turned sixteen and put the title in my name. “So nobody can ever argue about it,” he said.
He died two years ago. Last spring, I came home for Mother’s Day and the boat was gone from the side of the garage. My brother, Travis, had sold it for $3,500. My mom said she’d told him it was fine. “You live in an apartment, Katie. Where were you going to keep a boat?”
I pointed out that the trailer was titled to me. Travis shrugged and said the buyer “didn’t care about paperwork.” I left that weekend without speaking to either of them.
Three weeks later, a man named Hank called me. He was seventy, he said, a retired machinist from two towns over. He’d bought a little Lund off a young guy and was cleaning it up for his grandson, and he’d found my name and number on the inside of the dry box lid, written in marker.
“There’s something else in here,” he said. “A logbook. It’s mostly fish. Walleye, perch, the water temp. Your dad was very thorough. But there’s one entry I think you need to hear.”
He read it to me over the phone. His voice was steady, like he’d practiced.
“June 9, 2019. Took Katie out to Mud Lake. She caught nothing. Lost two lures. Laughed the whole day. Best day I’ve ever had on this boat. When I’m gone, this boat is hers. Not the house, not the money, the boat. If anybody else is reading this, it’s because somebody made a mistake. Please find her.”
I sat on my kitchen floor and cried so hard Hank had to wait a couple of minutes.
“I’d like to give it back to you,” he said when I could hear him again. “I’d feel like I was fishing in somebody else’s church.”
I offered to pay him the $3,500. He wouldn’t take it. “Get it from whoever spent it,” he said.
I did. I sent my brother a copy of the title and a copy of the logbook entry. He paid back every dollar within a week. He didn’t argue. My mom called me that night, crying. She said she’d never read the log. She hadn’t known.
“I should have asked you,” she said. “Before I said yes to anything.”
Hank delivered the boat himself, towing it two hours with his own truck. He refused to let me pay for the gas. He had one condition: that I’d take his grandson fishing someday, in that boat, and teach him something my dad taught me.
Last June, I did. We went to Mud Lake. We caught nothing. He lost a lure. I wrote it in the log.
