Spin a good yarn at the Lake View Inn and Wally the bartender may reward you with a free drink. When I arrived on a recent evening, my good friend Chuck Larson was just wrapping up some tale of woe ...

Boating lost a big chunk of its innocence on the terrible night of Aug. 20 when a 38-foot, high-performance craft slammed into a cabin cruiser in the darkness of a Smith Mountain Lake Saturday night.

There I sat, four miles out on Lake Superior. On a Monday. In April. Not a single boat in sight. The steering wheel that I had been turning so gingerly for the last two seasons finally got the best of ...