An Aging Fleet of Toys: Alumaweld Jet Boat

As Iook at my life at age 67, I see an aging fleet of toys. The things that I have collected to entertain myself are getting old just like me. My most recent struggle was with my boat. I did some trading in about 1998 and ended up with an Alumaweld 17' jet river boat. I acquired the boat from one of my Argo dealers in Oregon. The boat had been used for fishing on the Rogue Rive in Oregon. The all aluminum welded hull is powered by a 150 hp Evinrude Jet 105 outboard Jet drive motor. This boat was designed and built to be powered by this motor and was originally sold by Alumaweld as a package. The motor and boat were built in 1991. The boat was only about 8 years old when I got it. This has been the perfect boat for us.

In the beginning, we used it to go up the Yuba River from Yuba City to Daguerra Point Dam. We had been using another jet powered boat to get up there to fish for salmon. The Alumaweld boat was a lot heavier and we would strip out everything we could and reduce our fuel load as much as we could. We would take the treacherous trek up the river as far as we could go with a boat. As we got older and smarter, we left that excursion for the younger and braver fishermen.

The next 10 years were spent up in Sierra City camping in the Sierra Skies RV park. We were close to many beautiful trout fishing lakes and we used the boat extensively over those years. Over the many years, the boat has been on the following waterways.

Feather River

Yuba River

Sacramento River

The Sacramento River Delta

Davis Lake

Gold Lake

Salmon Lake

Oroville Lake

Bullards Bar Reservoir

Spaulding Lake

Berryessa Lake

Pacific Ocean

Jackson Meadows Lake

Thermalito Afterbay

Englebright Lake

Stampede Lake

Bucks Lake

Little Grass Valley Lake

Collins Lake

Lake Almanor

Frenchman Lake

Antelope Lake

East Park Res.

The boat recently developed a problem that I was not able to properly diagnose and it had to go the the boat shop for about 10 days to figure it out. During that time I started thinking about my options if the motor was not fixable. As I said before, the boat was designed around the jet outboard. Jet outboards require a higher transom height than prop outboards. Long Short, it is not going to be easy to change it over to a prop outboard and a replacement jet outboard is out of my price range. The motor turned out to be okay, so we are back in business. However, that motor will probably not outlast me, so I am going to have to look at future options.