A couple of years ago my friends and I decided to rent a houseboat for a weekend. This was a nice boat from a large marina; it had 8 cabins, a fold out couch that made for another bed, a hot tub and a waterslide. We took Eric’s boat. Derrick’s boat and jet ski for transportation. We also had the last two kegs of beer that The Great Southern Brewing Company ever produced, five gallons of Jack Daniel's, various other whiskeys, and a hay bail of, well, let’s just call it wacky tobacco. This had all the makings of a great weekend.

We truly had a great cast of characters there as well. Eric Weaver, Derrick Johnson, Dave Hom, Big Sexy, Sean Morton, Shawn O’Neil, Dave Bales, Dancin’ Stevie, Easy E, Mark Ryan, Steven Lee, Tim P, and many others. There were certainly far more people than there was bed space. With this group it did not take long for hijinks to ensue.

I have lots of lost time from this weekend so I am going to cover the highlights. They are pretty entertaining.

We started out at Rainbow Dock (this place no longer exists, but that is a story for another time). Dancin Stevie, myself, and Fal (one of my favorite people of all time) met the Derrick and crew there as it was the closest dock for all of us. We headed out to the dock that we had rented the boat from. The Weav was already pretty loaded and began hitting on Fal. Fal is sort of like a cat, meaning she loves being the center of attention, and was eating this up. We made it to the marina where all of the rest of the guys were loading the provisions into the floating palace of debauchery that we had rented. The marina owners looked positively horrified by the sheer volume of alcohol that was being loaded on their ship. I think they knew that they were going to get to keep the damage deposit.

Well we took the boat to the cove we had chosen to drop anchor in and the party started. We had to take the various boats back and forth to different marinas to pick up and drop off various members of our motley little crew. Sadly Fal’s mother would not let her miss the week-long cheerleading camp that she was supposed to attend with the rest of the Clinton High School cheerleaders; yes Fal was in high school at the time. What can I say she is a fun person to have around and was an extremely good friend. It also didn't hurt that she was balls hot. On one such trip down the lake the wind caught the hay bail and it was lost to us early on in the weekend. That may have been for the best since I don’t think we had enough food to compensate for the munchies that this stuff would have brought on. The Weav organized a search party but the herb was never found and he resigned himself to merely a shit drunk weekend.

Day one started to wind down and I wanted to go to Shang-Hai marina and visit my friend Laura. Her parents own the marina and she always told me how good the food was, so I decided we needed to go. Unfortunately this was at about 9:30 and we had been drinking heavily since about noon. I finally convinced Dancin Stevie to go with me and he got the keys to Derrick’s boat. Sadly it was dark and neither of us knew exactly how to get to Shang-Hai from where we were. We did think we knew the general direction though so we were off. Now imagine a pair of drunks on a boat on a dark lake trying to navigate by a one million candle power spotlight. We found Shang-Hai at about 11. It was already closed for the evening, as everything on the lake shuts down early. It turns out that the marina in question was only about a 15 minute ride away. I have no clue how it took us an hour and a half to find it. Even more miraculously we found our way back to the houseboat. The party there was still jumping and we even had naked hot tub. That’s right everybody was so drunk they were willing to be around a naked Pat.

I eventually passed out in the cabin I had claimed as my own for the night. The next morning I woke up to find Dave Bales drinking wine directly from the bladder, this is what is inside the Franzia box, while Dave Hom had some Cheerios and a glass of rum. Well it looks like the day has started off right. We even had a hand full of new people join us on the second day. It was mostly more of the same, extreme drunken fun. At one point the battery on Derrick’s Jet Ski died. Stevie and I decided to steal his boat to go get a new battery. We once again arrived at Shang-Hai and this time they were open. I can imagine the people in the no wake zone’s horror as two drunks rode through blaring the Men without Hat’s classic “The Safety Dance” over and over. They had the battery that we needed but it was gonna take time to charge it up. The Dancin One and myself decided to grab some food while we waited. Apparently they also add the battery acid right before they charge it up. I’m told I was warned about this but I grabbed the battery anyway and it almost went tumbling into the lake as the acid seared my hands. After a few minutes of screaming like a girl the pain subsided and we went to install the battery. At one point I decided to ride the Jet Ski. Now I am not exactly Mr. Dexterity when I’m sober and at this point I had been drinking for nearly 30 consecutive hours. I got on the Jet Ski easily enough and took off. I got about 150 yards away from the houseboat when I fell off. My friends all ran to the top deck of the houseboat and began pointing and laughing at me this went on for at least 20 minutes as I tried in vain to get back on the Jet Ski. Not one of my friends stopped laughing long enough to help me, in their defense they were all just as drunk if not drunker than I was and probably could have done nothing for me anyway. Eventually strangers noticed my plight and hauled my tired and starting to sober up butt back to the houseboat. I immediately began drinking again as sober was something I didn’t want to be this weekend.

A short while later I found myself in the hot tub with The Weave and Dancin Stevie. I guess since I had started to sober up and began drinking again that the whiskey really got to me. I would call myself rip-roaring drunk at that point. I jumped out of the hot tub to go cause mayhem. As my handler Dancin Stevie would have normally at least attempted to stop me but his drunkenness and the Weav’s intervention let me escape down stairs. Ash was sleeping on the couch. Derrick and the others thought it would be funny if I did a moonsault on the sleeping Ash. For those of you who aren’t wrestling fans a moonsault is pretty much a back flip on to your opponent. I decided that I would launch myself from the captain's chair of the boat. The chair in question is actually just a bar stool that is in no manner attached to the floor of the boat. I took a running shot and somehow managed to jump on the stool, which of course began rotating. At this point Ash woke up and to his horror realized what was going on, he got the hell out of Dodge at that point. I attempted my move anyway and ended up landing on my head, the alcohol surging through my system saved me from the pain, at least for a couple of days and I was none the worse for wear. Stevie later told me he feared something bad had happened when he felt the boat shake from my impact but the Weav assured him I would be fine and there was no need to go check on me.

Well I recovered a little while later and the drinking games had begun. Dancin Stevie, Easy E, Dave Hom, and Molly (Tim P’s girlfriend, though their dating status was shaky and not quite clear at the time) were playing some sort of game where when a certain things happened that everyone passed their top to the right. At one point Stevie was wearing Molly’s bikini top (sadly those pictures have disappeared). At some point Stevie, Molly, and I went up to the hot tub. Now the way this boat was wired you couldn’t heat the hot tub and use the oven without kicking every breaker on the boat. About the time we went up to the hot tub somebody downstairs decided to cook. We had the hot tub cranked up but we noticed that the thermometer had only gone up a few degrees. It turned out that we had been warming the water because we all were peeing in it. Needless to say it was the only time all weekend anybody took a shower.

There were two heads (bathrooms for the naval illiterate) and Stevie and Mollie each had one occupied washing our urine off themselves. This is when the huge crap cramp hit me. I had no idea what to do and Morton suggested I just crap in the lake. I wasn’t opposed to this but the last time I had gotten in the water for such an endeavor a large turd floated up into my life jacket. Fortunately my drunken stupor subsided long enough for me to find a solution. There was a hatch that opened to the water so you could raise the prop of the boat up to work on it without having to get into the lake. I opened the hatch, had a seat, and let the fecal matter fly. It wasn’t long before Morton walked up to see me doing my business. He began yelling at me which attracted the Weav. He also got in on the yelling action. Derrick’s cabin was the one to the rear of the boat and therefore the one nearest the yelling’s. HHG demanded that he go see what was going on. He didn’t want to but I’m pretty sure the interruption had blown any chance he had of getting laid that night so he, against his better judgment, came out to see what was happening. Needless to say he got in on the yelling’s and beatings as well.

The final Day was fairly uneventful but it did let us tally up the damage we had done. Here is a small list of the debauchery: 3 empty kegs of beer, 5 empty gallons of Jack Daniel's, 17 other empty bottles of liqueur, 5 lost cell phones, 12 lost pairs of sunglasses, and a large turd setting on a cross beam near the prop. I assume Derrick did not get his damage deposit back. I may find more stuff to add to this later but that is the houseboat weekend as best as I can recall it.