As many of you know I live on a lake in North Carolina.  And we're always looking for good ways to have fun on the lake here.  We've got boats and kayaks and bass boats and a pontoon boat and lots and lots of fishing docks.  As were looking at the summer though we see a few gaps in our lake lineup.
One of those is a jet ski and the other one is an inflatable boat.  The jet ski is probably an obvious thing that can seem like a lot of fun on a lake but many people don't realize how much fun inflatable boats can be on a lake.  I'm not talking about something that you blow up with your mouth that you just purchased at Wal-Mart.

I'm talking about something a lot more rugged that can actually mount a motor on it like a zodiac.  Maybe you can picture one of those inflatable rafts of the used in the movie Navy Seals with Demi Moore.

Those boats with the right motor on them can fly.  I don't mean flying here she had a good wave, but I do mean they can go very fast because they're extremely light and they have very little drag in the water.  That means if you've got a average sized motor, you can plan out of the water and go pretty fast pretty easily.  That could mean a lot of fun on a lake.

Now I'm not saying that you water ski behind him, but it would actually feel like you're on a jet ski and some ways.  In fact, when you're on an inflatable boats, there's a lot of things about the water that actually feel like you're on the water as opposed to sitting in some fiber glass or metal pole of the boat or jet ski.

On our lake, we don't have much of a current so this is something that you can do something like a river run on.  We don't have white waters and we don't have much of a current so if you're going anywhere you had to do it under your own power or with the motor.  That said I have a lot of friends and to a number of different river run type trips down other rivers around the country.  This is about it's fairly easy to haul around and you can take with you without having to spend a lot of money on gas to get it there.

So as I look at what I'm going to be doing for fun this summer, and be given a hard look at whether not this is the year to pick up a zodiac and speed around the lake on it.

Kind of reminds me of one of my favorite Authors, Neal Stephenson.  He wrote an early book called Zodiac about an Eco-Detective that kept Boston Harbor safe from polluters with a high speed Zodiac, while half out of his mind on nitrous Oxide.