It’s been said that finding a diamond in the rough is nearly impossible these days!  But maybe we just aren’t looking in the right places?  The beauty Mother Nature presents in the fall season when she paints the foliage of the trees with the reds, golds, oranges, greens and yellows truly can’t be rivaled by a mire diamond, and she did Dillon Lake in a spectacular array of those colors! 
Even though the day was overcast, it didn’t seem to have detoured any of the those that showed up for a day of doing our thing, running some of our favorite old motors on boats of all kinds and just catching up with friends we haven’t see in a while!  
I could see the parking lot was already pretty full of cars, trucks and boats on trailers when I pulled in!  And many of our members already had swap items out for display and sale. So it was lining up to be another memorable day for the WRC! 
A few of the guys were getting ready to launch and I decided it was time for the old Arkansas Traveler to hit the water too. The launch ramp at Dillon is fairly steep as they have to contend with the yearly rise from the winter thaws and spring rains that vary the lake height of 15 – 20 ft throughout the year. Yesterday it was at what seemed to be a middle point height wise and was fairly easy to launch the boats!
A few of the boats I recognized were John Hagerman’s Alumacraft with a equally nice Johnson 25 on the transom. Bob Korosa had his beautiful “Shell Lake” with a half pint Johnson 9.5 on the back. Dave Mettle had a nice FeatherCraft with an Evinrude 25 or 35(?) on it . Randy Heinle had his very nice moulded plywood rig with an Evinrude Lark on the transom. Marty Belfi brought his LoneStar with a 35 Evinrude. Jerry Kay had his Chrestliner with his newly acquired Elgin 45 on the transom, and a fine job of tuning it he did! Jay Millar brought his Aluminum boat with a Merc Mk 30 attached, I didn’t get to see it run but knowing Jay I’m sure it ran great??? Randy Wilcox had his aluminum boat with an Evinrude 15hp on the transom, once he got it running with Jay coaching him it ran very nicely, as Evinrudes usually do!  Kerry York probably had the most unique boat brought that day, a 20 -24 ft aluminum LoanStar cabin cruiser with a Johnson V4 that I was told Jay had worked on and tuned up producing around 150 hp Hmmmmm?  But I can confirm it ran great and was pretty peppy for a boat that size!  I know I’ve missed a couple but will try to do better next time. 
After launching The old Ark, I got the Merc 200 fired up and made several runs around the lake checking out all of our members boats as the went by.  Hopefully between John H. our Photographer and me, we will have pictures of boats on the boats on the water and will have them posted to our web site the : wrcoutboards.org
Unfortunately the day was cut short at around 1:30 – 2:00 pm buy the rain, and guys were wrapping things up and pulling out trying to keep from getting soaked.  All in all is was a fun day and I suspect we will have more meets at Dillon in the future! 
And Remember ~  Keep The Blue Smoke Flowing! 

Gary