You remember the day you bought the boat. A 2017 Carolina Skiff DLV. Center console. Sea foam green hull. You’d saved for three years, eating peanut butter sandwiches at your desk while your coworkers ordered Seamless. The day you towed it home, your wife came outside, wiped her hands on her jeans, and just said, “So that’s the one.”

You hand him the roll of electrical tape. “You just did.”

And in the morning, when the sun hits the driveway, you’ll back Grace into the water. The trim gauge will still read empty. The radio will still be static. But the engine will turn over on the first try. The nav lights will burn steady.

Then the radio died. Then the trim gauge. Then, on a foggy morning in September, the engine turned over once, coughed, and went silent. You drifted for an hour before the Coast Guard Auxiliary towed you back. Your boy wasn’t asking questions anymore. He was just staring at the water, quiet.

“Yeah,” you say. “Gonna trace every wire. Every splice. Every ground.”

The subject line reads:

“Better,” you whisper. “I found the problem.”

You look at the diagram. Then at the boat on the trailer. Then back at him.

Each line is a promise you made. Each connection a Sunday you spent napping instead of tracing voltage drops.

That night, you don’t sleep. You sit in the garage with a multimeter, a headlamp, and the diagram spread across the concrete. You find the first bad ground behind the console—just like LowCountryLife said. Green crusted on the terminal. You clean it. Reattach it. The dome light flickers. Then holds.