Some friends and I recently visited the Muskoka region of Ontario, where an old college friend (Jerod) recently purchased a second-hand motorboat from a retiring Quebecois couple. He’d promised a few us a great weekend at the lake, on the agreement that we help get this secondhand watercraft seaworthy.

This was, regrettably, a bit of challenging. Most of the paint on the hull was rusting, the motor was in urgent need of a tune-up, and the pontoon seats were flaky and frayed. It wasn’t quite the weekend of enjoyment we’d been planning to, but it was an exciting (or at a minimum interesting) one nevertheless.

It began with a half-dozen stops at nearby hardware, boating and home decoration stores, haphazardly collecting the materials we required to get the “Rose of Conakry” (as Jerod had named her) shipshape again. To my surprise, the pontoon boat seats proved to be the hardest to spruce up.

While the majority of the mechanical problems could be remedied using either some oil or a reluctantly-purchased replacement part, the pontoon seats were strongly fused into the boat itself, rendering it impossible to replace with removing a significant part of the furnishings.

Our early efforts to fix them together with transparent tape and adhesive yielded unsuccessful – we made the pontoon boat seat equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster. Rather, we ended up just ripping out most of the fabric, and substituting it using some off-white material we’d chemically treated for water damage.

Unfortunately, the “Rose of Conakry” will never possess the fresh-off-the-line appeal it must’ve had years ago, but I surely prefer it this way, it feels robust, lived in. Around Sunday evening we lastly managed to take the “Rose” out onto the river, where we enjoyed a few hours of kicking back beers and waiting for the fish.

The common air horn: enhancer of graduation ceremonies, sporting event attention-getter, and the perfect way to wake someone out of a drunken slumber. But air horns are expensive and they don’t last that long — there’s got to be a better way!

While $30 might seem like quite an outlay for an air horn, the Ecoblaster can be refilled endlessly with ordinary, everyday air from a bike pump. Each recharge provides up to 70 adjustable-volume blasts of up to 115 decibels apiece.

Bonus: you can take it to your next environmental rally, as it doesn’t use any harmful gases. It also meets Coast Guard regulations, so get one for the pontoon and start honking at people.

Ecoblaster Rechargable Air Horn [Things You Never Knew Existed via OhGizmo!]