Anchors away

Lots of beers, a bunch of dudes and a sailboat. Perfect setting to take the boat out for the first time since being towed back to the doc. The plan is simple, leave the doc, motor a few miles down the river, anchor overnight and come back the next morning. I had replaced the dead starter battery and also the house batteries and felt fairly confident things would go well. In order to get out of the main river I had to do a tight 180 turn. Unsure of the exact turning radius I decided to do a fairway turn, where you pop the engine in short intervals of forward and then reverse and it enables one to turn the boat around on it’s axis. Everything was working out great and I just needed to power the boat up in forward gear to clear a docked boat and motor out into the delta. As increased power the boat suddenly started drifting backwards. I thought the wind was overpowering the bow so I gave it more throttle and the boat quickly got stuck in the mud and reeds behind me. 30 minutes. 30 minutes after leaving the doc and I was stuck again. More frustrating was the fact that I could see my doc, lying empty 300 yards away. It was noon, sunny and the increasing temp had all of us sweating. The best course of action was to stop an drink a beer. After further investigation I found out the linkage to the transmission broke and when I throttled forward it actually put the boat in reverse. We fixed the linkage and rowed the dinghy out a 100 yards and dropped an anchor. We wrapped the anchor line around the a winch on the main mast and cranked on it, pulling the boat slowly forward out of the mud. I powered up the engine and this time confidently in forward gear we slowly motored out to the river. Ah it felt good. As we said in the Marines, adapt and overcome. And that’s what we did. The rest of the trip went well. Anchored, drank and laughed. The next morning we returned and the boat would wait patiently again to be brought out.