Of all the cities in the United States, Houston is probably the one that's closest in spirit and reality to the mythos of the wild, wild West. It's big; it's sprawling; it's rough and tumble. You can go there and turn nothing into a fortune, or a fortune into nothing. The city lives by bar-fight rules, and the first rule of a bar fight is that there are no rules. In other words, Houston's a city tailor-made for a boat like Baja's new 192 Islander, a little street brawler of a boat that plays bigger than it is.

Baja 192 Islander waits patiently to be picked up at the Airtex MarineMax, on the northern outskirts of Houston. A cursory glance at a map shows that Lake Houston's only a few short miles away, so one might think that it won't be but a few minutes between the pickup of the boat and the beginning of a day on the water. One would be wrong. As Dave Lockwood, MarineMax service manager, explains, Lake Houston's too shallow and also too full of debris to safely test a boat.

That doesn't mean Lake Houston is a boat-free zone. No way. There's no shortage of Houstonians who are willing to dodge shallows and tree trunks in an effort to get their watery fixes. It just means that Lockwood wisely decides it's not a good idea to risk a brand-new, unsold 192 Islander. So instead of the short jaunt to Lake Houston, getting out on the 192 Islander means making the hour-long trek north to Lake Conroe.

Traffic, of course, turns the hour-long trip into a 90-minute struggle, not taking into account the 45 minutes it takes to get from the Hotel Icon in downtown Houston to the Airtex MarineMax. Total travel time: 2 hours and 15 minutes. Total distance traveled: 50 miles. Ah, the joys of big-city traffic.
Water, though, washes away all stress and sin (and you can be sure that if cussing is a sin, after 2-plus hours in traffic, everyone's a sinner), so once the Baja's skimming across Lake Conroe, the tension just starts to melt away.

It's a refreshing reminder of what makes boating so great. On a 'good day' like this ' middle of the week, mid-afternoon thunderstorms in the forecast ' the lake is relatively empty. Houstonians have a hard-earned respect for weather, and they don't take forecasts lightly. It's said that once, as a tornado ripped down the western stretch of I-610 (The Loop), the TV weatherman said only, 'It's
not so bad outside, as long as you're in downtown.' So if storms are forecast, only the insane, the foolhardy and the doomed venture out onto the Houston area lakes.

So the crew's out (you decide which category fits) on Lake Conroe, nervously watching the skies grow angrier by the minute. In sharp contrast, the guide, Lockwood, seems utterly unconcerned by the forecast, the mammatus clouds gathering overhead, and the fact that the 20-foot boat he's piloting is slashing along through moderate chop at a solid 50 mph. All Lockwood wants to talk about is the fact that right ahead, just past the breakwaters that the 192 Islander seems slated to hit in about 5 seconds, is the famed Bentwater Resort (www.bentwater.com), where he and his lovely wife tied the knot.