I opened the stern storage and reached down into the bilge where the hull narrows, and I set the tarp strap down real slow, because after a year under a staked-down tarp, a fresh dry bundle where no fresh dry bundle should be is the kind of thing that stops a man cold.
It was not what I feared. It was a soft-sided cooler bag, and inside it, dry and new, was a childs stuffed bear, a folded drawing, and a plastic bag of little treasures, a shark tooth, a lucky rock, a friendship bracelet.
There was a note in a young hand. Please dont throw these away. This was my dads boat. He is gone now and Mom couldnt pay the marina and they are selling it. I come sometimes to sit in it. I put my things where he used to keep his tackle so a part of me stays on his boat. I am sorry I keep sneaking in.
The fresh hand at the stern was not a thief. It was a child, whose father had died and whose family could not keep his boat, coming down to the marina to sit in the one place that still felt like her dad, and tucking her small treasures into the bilge so a piece of her would ride along with him forever.
Twenty years around boats and I have found some things in a bilge. I never found a grieving child hiding her heart in one.
I found the family. It took some asking around the marina, but everybody knew the girl who came to sit in the old bass boat. Her mother, worn thin, had no idea her daughter had been slipping down to the water.
I did not keep that boat. I signed it right back over to that little girl and her mother for one dollar, with the trailer, and I told the marina the back slip fees were mine to settle, because a child who loves a boat that much should not lose it over money.
She still keeps her treasures in the bilge where her daddy kept his tackle. Only now it is her boat, legally, and nobody is going to take it from under her again.
Somebody had been under that tarp within days, all right. It was a little girl visiting her father the only place she had left to find him, and the best thing I have done in twenty years of buying boats was hand this one back to her.