Interesting trip to the lake

We are out at Clinton Lake with our boat. Joining us is our friend Diego who has never tried to ski and we are going to try to get him up on our new skis we bought this spring.

After a couple attempts, Nancy turns and suddenly says "Look at the smoke!" I look and a couple hundred yards away we see smoke billowing from a boat. I yell to Diego to let go of the rope and we leave him and speed over to the boat. We see another boat already there and throwing life jackets into the water and finally one last person jumping into the water off the flaming boat with 5 other and a dog already in the water. We quickly go pick up 4 people and the dog while the other two climb into the other boat. Everyone is trying to hurry as we don't know if there could be an explosion as the boat is engulfed in flames. Fortunatley no one seems hurt, just a bit frazzled.

Obviously this attracts a crowd, some of which were Sea-doos/jet-skis. They start charging the boat and turning sharply in an attempt to spray water onto the boat to put the fire out. We are thinking they are idiots as there still could be an explosion and they might run into each other (which almost happened once).

So we leave to head to the marina and pull up to a campground when we see a couple police cars and a fire truck. Those on the boat give a statement, etc... to the officer and we load back up, drop them off at the marina and head back out for a normal day at the lake. :-)

While at the marina, we did find out that the Water Rescue never came because the lift their boat was on would not lower the boat into the water. Interesting, Huh?

We did get Diego skiing by the end of the day, so all was not lost.

They had decided to just let the boat burn down and the anchor line had burned/melted and the

boat drifted across the lake and finally hit land. Fortunately it was a relatively open with no trees directly overhead as is the case in many parts of the lake. We went by 2-3 hours later and it was still burning away.

A couple weeks later we went by and it was still there washed up on shore.