Damn the Dam Run! Part 1

I have been hearing about the "Dam Run" on various forums for years now. I have always wanted to make one, but lets be honest it's hard to break out of my little shell called "Parker." It always came down to the choice of venture into the great unknown or hit a nice dinner and RoadRunner with my friends. This year it literally came down to the last minute, with me texting Racey that we are on our way to Parker and clear the path. Tom Bulger (TBulger on the boards) pulled rank and called me up and said "Bullshit, get your ass up here now." Now for those that don't know Tom is like a second dad to me, and I worked for him for years, and still continue to do sales as a side gig for his company Scicon Technologies. (www.scicontech.com if you want to see some high tech prototyping abilities.)

Tom had dropped the hammer, and he "wasn't asking" in the phone call if you catch my drift. Stacy said she wanted to roll out in the morning, and I explained to her the same thing I'm going to explain to all of you right now. There's a list exactly one person long that when they say jump, I say how high.. His is actually "Tom / Boss Hog / Bulger" and he said it's time to go, that means now.. Not tomorrow morning, not an hour from now.. It means get your things and get in the car.

So we are in the truck and heading to Katherine's Landing. I have never driven up there before, but it's a completely weird deal with little tiny deserted roads with lots of twists and turns. You get the impression that every time you come around a corner you're gonna see a coyote or a bob cat, or with my luck tag a wild donkey doing double the speed limit. Which actually brings me to my rule of thumb about desert driving.. Generally double the speed limit is appropriate for middle of the night slab runs in the desert. I would not recommend that theory after you pass through Topock, because some of those corners are tighter then you think, and we actually caught air in the Silverado a couple of times in the bumps.. Or rather "whoop sections" depending on how you look at it.

We rolled up to the no tell motel, (or at least that's what they should've called it) and were pleasantly surprised to find out that the room rates were literally double that of Laughlin 10 minutes down the road. Lesson # 1 for all of you potential future dam runners, stay in Laughlin. Enen and I cracked into a 30 pack of bullets while waiting for his wife and children to arrive. About 15 minutes later or 2 1/2 beers a piece (depending on what kind of time you're keeping) his wife showed up and deposited the kids in the room. Judging from the outside I had my suspicions about the quality of accommodations, when Jen returned to say goodnight she confirmed them all. Stacy and Jen hit the sack, and Enen and myself decided to put a dent in the cooler and hang out with the locals.

Pics of the Locals and the start of our dent in the cooler.

Tidying up a bit, before we made a second run at it.. LOL

I had arrived around 1:30 am, and it's now 4:00 am when I decided to hit the sack because it was going to be an early 7:00 am morning. I opened the door to the room, and was pleasantly surprised at how well the A/C was working.. It damn well should've been working well because it sounded like a Cummin's turbo diesel idling about 4' from our heads. I realize in these articles that we have an opportunity to make them more interesting to read, or make a good time a little better with adjectives.. Hell we might even embellish on occasion, if it makes the story, on a member trip. I want to be very clear about this. If somehow magically you were able to put Billdo's Turbo Diesel Dodge in the hotel room with you and start it up, it would sound exactly like this AC unit did, and be the same volume. Strangely that loud noise put me into a deep sleep with dreams about rolling coal (youtube it if you don't know what it is) on folks. I woke up at 7:00 feeling fairly spry all things considered, but I revert back to "Remember lesson 1.. Stay in laughlin."

Now we enter lesson 2. Whom ever said you have to get up at 7:00 owes me two hours of sleep. You don't even need to get up at 8:00 actually. We got showered and went downstairs to find out we were literally the only people awake. We figured we would kill sometime and get some breakfast only to find out the restaurant doesn't open until 8:00 am. We sat down on the bench for a few and were then welcomed by the rest of the group and we all filed in to what would be a considerably good breakfast. (2 eggs over medium, sour dough toast, bacon if you're curious)

After Breakfast, we loaded the coolers and started carrying them down to the boat. We had a spot on the "E" dock, which looked pretty far away from the restaurant. Carrying a 50+lb cooler for what seemed like miles confirmed again that it was every bit as far away as I thought it was. There was a lot of thoughts about quitting smoking, needing to get in shape, I might be having a heart attack, happening when I finally got to dock "E." Lesson # 3, Just pull the boat up to the restaurant when it's loading time.

We hit the water around 9:30 and there was already a few boats sitting out there waiting. 10:00 rolled around, and we still weren't going anywhere but the boat count was rising every couple of minutes.. I had always just assumed this was a 4-5 boat get together.. At around 10:30'ish we saw the last of our group coming out of the marina with our Team Leader Campbell Carl aboard Enen's 32 Schiada. The total boat count was somewhere around 15 boats at this point. We tryed, but we couldn't get pictures of them all.

Jamie from AZ Ski Shots bad ass 26 Force [/ul]