was a rental from the Fort
Leonard Wood Recreation
Marina, and its crew were of -
duty soldiers. The two on the
sun pad clearly didn’t realize
why they had been stopped or
they would’ve moved.
“It’s real easy to fall of of the
sun pad when you’re moving,”
said Mosher. They sat down
with military precision and she
continued, “It’s also illegal.” You
could’ve heard a pin drop.
Somebody of ered her a
cold soda. She declined, but
her demeanor went from all-
business to fun.
“OK, now, you gotta stay
inside the boat. You’ve all got
a life jacket, right?” Everybody
held one up. Somebody no-
ticed my camera.
“Can you take our picture?”
I complied and took a full
group shot, and we exchanged
mobile numbers to transfer it.
2 P.M.
We still hadn’t written a ticket.
Late to the rendezvous with my
relatives’ houseboat, I called on
the mobile. The location was
now Hummingbird Cove, not
Red Bud. We were 15 minutes
away, and that miscalculation
aligned our arrival with the only
ticket of the day. I don’t know if
the guy was lucky or unlucky.
At the mouth of Humming-
bird, we spotted a grandfather-
ly man idling on a watercraft
who, when he spotted us, began
shaking his head in dismay. He
was pulling two boys on a tube
— without a spotter. While we
were a couple hundred yards
away, she’d watched him pull
away from an express cruiser.
“Go on back to your other
boat and I’ll meet you there,”
she said. He turned, and the next
thing I noticed was his jacket
wasn’t buckled. Then I spot-
ted a baby dozing
between his knees
with a loose, inef ec-
tive life jacket.Mosher
approaches
a boater in
Hummingbird
Cove, above. A
ra -up in Party
Cove, below.demanding to go. But he
knew Mosher had to write
him up, and truthfully, he
was lucky we came along be-
fore he got farther away from
the boat.
I really wanted to take that
photograph, but I couldn’t.
He was in enough misery.
But on any given Saturday on
Lake of the Ozarks, stopping
an event like that could just
save a life. And that’s all the
Missouri state troopers want
to do.“Sir, you’re taking on a
little too much responsibility
there,” she said once the wa-
tercraft quit rumbling.
“I know. The baby wouldn’t
sleep, so we thought the ride
would help,” he said as a wom-
an on board took the baby be-
low deck. I could imagine how
hard the screaming must’ve
been to get him to try the old
car-ride trick with
the watercraft, and
I could also imag-
ine the older boysBOATINGMAG.COM | MAY 2018 | 87