The POS earns its name

Today we hitched up the POS and decided to try our hands in the Cooper with it. Indiana went along to fish and watch the boat for us, so we had a pretty full boat. My first inkling that today wasn't going to go right came when the motor wouldn't stay started. I finally kept it running in choke, but we were crawling down the river. Maybe it had something to do with the load we were carrying, maybe there's something wrong with the motor? I mentally chalked it up to the load and we continued without incident on our way to our dive spot. We landed the boat, suited up, and walked in to find a marl bottom littered with rock. Tha duDe stayed perched up there on that little shelf, but I was in exploration mode. I went on down the shelf and it hit about 14 feet and then there was a drop-off. I peered down into seemingly neverending darkness. I had no idea how deep the hole was, but I lowered my legs down first the whole time hoping that my fins would touch the bottom soon. When they did, I was relieved and lowered myself the rest of the way onto a huge gravel bed. There were bones and big rocks everywhere, and I thought of da f0ssZ's dive there last year where he scored several nice megs in this very spot. I still wanted to explore, though, so I kept swimming. I never did run out of rock, but I was running out of air. At 500 PSI, I headed back to shore and while fighting the current, I started to use up air faster than I thought I would. When the depth hit about 10 feet, I poked my head out of the water and saw where I needed to go, then went back under. Its easier to swim against the current on the bottom than it is on the surface. I looked at my guage - I was down to 200 PSI. It was getting hard to breathe. I got about 20 feet from shore when I ran out of air completely. Crap! I didn't want to ditch my weight belt yet, so I lunged out of the water and grabbed a stump. I made it. Indiana threw me a float and pulled me in. Whew! Next time I go to this spot, I'm going back to shore when I'm at 1000 PSI! I had completely underestimated how far my meanderings underwater had taken me. Indiana said that I was almost completely on the other side of the river! The worst part about the whole deal was that I lost my bag. In lunging for the stump, I must have dropped it. Bummer! I would try to find in on my second dive. I headed straight for where I thought it was, and it was there, Thank goodness! I decided that on this dive, I would stay in the shallows and just hunt there. I fanned and fanned, and I thought I was going to find a whole meg when I started finding lots of chunks, but it never happened. Tha duDe, though, did find a little meg down there on his second dive. His first one, and his streak continued. We packed up the gear and dragged the boat down to the water. The tide had gone down, and the boat was 5 feet above the water level. That was hard! Then, it started giving us the same problem as before. It wouldn't stay started, and I had to run it in choke. Well, finally, it died for the last time, and we resorted to rowing against a full force falling tide. We were losing ground and getting washed toward the harbor. Granted, it was a long way off, but had we not flagged someone down, its probably where we would have ended up. But, we did flag someone down and he threw us a rope and towed us back to the landing. The DNR guy escorted us and slowed down the continuous stream of passers-by that saw our wretched, humiliating state. Lousy boat... I need a new boat. Too bad I missed the Power Ball the other night! Dang! And I was so sure I would win!