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the floor as possible. I am sure will be as safe as houses. Bloody better be. The seat sure is comfy though! I have decided not to permanently stick this seat down to the floor as when I sit on it, it moves not at all. Yet, if I want to shift the seat around the boat I can still do so easily. Works a treat! Room on the dash is pretty much non-existent, so the only place I could really see for the electric switches was on the port side. Because I have so many lights and other gizmos going into the boat I have had two multi-switch panels installed here, one of which incorporates a cigarette power plug. This is so I can plug in all sorts of useful items, spotlights, cellphones, iPods or a car GPS. (See, I had that in mind when I mentioned the GPS earlier!) I will still have the Ice Kube chillybin in the boat as a spare seat and footrest, and have gone for the new 40l version, which is an ideal spare seat for a small boat and of course, fish storage. Weight and the distribution thereof is a big concern for me in this project, as 13ft 6in is only a small boat for a guy my size, and I want to keep as much weight centred and forward as I can in the little tub. To this end, I have opted not for a single 25 litre fuel tank, but rather for two, smaller 12.5 litre tanks. This means that only a small tank needs to be at the back of the boat, while the other tank shall be kept for'ard under the foredeck as an insurance policy. The small tank actually fits completely under the aft coaming, whereas a 25 litre tank protrudes some 150mm into the cockpit. The smaller tank just looks so much neater and tidier. One of the important issues I could see with this little boat was that, as there is no access to the foredeck, anchoring off the bow was likely to be an issue. This I resolved by deciding early on in the process to deploy and recover the anchor over the side of the boat. To avoid having the anchor pulling directly on the side of the boat, never a safe idea, I will have a bow-line running from the bow to a large carabiner or similar clip. This I will attach to the anchor rope through a loop in the anchop warp, and then feed this further over the side, slackening the warp and letting the bow rope take up the strain of the anchor. This way I can also dickey with the angle of the boat, so in a light current, should I so wish, I can have the boat hang quarter-on into the current, instead of directly nose on all the time as you do from a bow-mounted anchor. Should the anchor be difficult to recover, rather than heaving on a heavy weight over the side of such a small and tip-able boat, I will simply use the tow-float method of lifting the anchor, attaching a large float (I have a 20 litre drum for'ard to do this) to the anchor rope, and then driving the boat up-current away from the anchor. This drives the float under the water applying enormous lifting pressure to the anchor, which will pop free of the bottom and rise to the surface with the float. If you have never seen this process before, check it out. It is a great way to lift an anchor, literally, no sweat! (especially good if anchoring in very deep waters). One thing that was a bit of a bugger with the boat was that, as she is a 35-year-old girl, her Perspex windscreen really was kinda opaque, not exactly a useful, see-through item any more. Frankly, it looks like heck. What to do, what to do? Then a brainwave came to me, a brilliant idea! Why not have a full-width decal across the whole windscreen to make it look better? I mean, when I am in the boat, my head clears the screen by a good foot or so anyhow, so it is not exactly serving any use as a transparent item. I distinctly remember having this brilliant idea immediately after Ken suggested something very similar. Well, maybe exactly the same. But it was still MY idea, I just had it in his brain first so as to not overtax my brain too much. Us superheroes can do that, you know. Honest. We had to get decals on the boat to conform with the local by-laws requiring 100mm high lettered names on both sides of the Ramona with the goods boat. Anyhow, so maybe the same guys could do something similar for the whole windscreen? Turned out this would be no problem at all, and a few days later, Sidekick was re-named and graced with a beautiful new windscreen decal to boot! Compared with the cost of replacing the Perspex, the $180-odd for the decals was well worth it, and makes the boat look just awesome! Next came a canopy. The old canopy for the boat was....well, hopelessly inadequate, I thought. Made out of ultra-lightweight aluminium tubing, I could see me in my ham-fistedness turning the whole thing into a mangled mess of metal and vinyl, so talking with Roger Boyles from Dr Trim (a local Matamata guy who has his shop in Morrinsville), we soon came up with a good canopy that would use 25mm aluminium pipe with thick 3mm walls... This will make it an uber-strong little canopy, which should cope having a gorilla like me inadvertently swinging on it! Well, that was all sorted out, and damn she looked good. With my next and last mission was to take her out to Lake Karapiro to give her a fang on the lake, run the motor a bit and check everything out. Wow. What an awesome little boat she is! The choice of the four- stroke motor is without doubt the best possible one. The motor is just so smooth, so quiet, it really is fantastic. At "cruising" revs of around 4300rpm, she skips along at 35kph, quite fast enough in such a small boat, at 5500rpm she does 45kph, and at full WOT of around 6000rpm, she clicks over to 50kph. In a small boat like Sidekick it feels darn near warp speed! If you are EVER faced with the choice between a two-stroke motor and one of the new four strokes, really, it is a no-brainer. Ignore the extra ouches, and get the four-stroke. You will never regret it. The next revelation was the lights. We deliberately stayed out after dark so we could test the lights in the darkness, and boy, what a difference they make! The underwater LEDs at the stern light the water up like an aquarium, but the very best result is the idea of having the little "chin" lights. Just the two small LED packs at the bow made a huge difference to the end of the trip in the dark. As we came in to the little jetty at the ski club, I flicked the lights on, and Hey Presto! Everything was clear as day. No glare in the eyes but the whole jetty area was suddenly well lit. Even better, when it came time to re-load the boat on the trailer, the lights made guiding the boat onto the rollers, clipping on the rope and winching her up massively easy. And once the bow nosed into the saddle at the winch, the same lights lit up the entire back of the truck, winch and trailer area. If you do not pop these little lights on any new boat you get guys, you are making an awful mistake. Having lights here are just bloody brilliant. So, there she is... Sidekick! An old girl with a face-lift she may be, but she is still a real little honey! May/June 2012 Professional Skipper 51