Many years ago, our family spent a week on a northern Minnesota lake vacationing at a resort with several other families.

While the adults did a little bit of fishing, most of their time was spent playing shuffleboard and quaffing cold ones.

We kids fished, and fished, and fished some more.

Best of all, the oldest were granted permission to use the 14-foot boat powered by a 7.5-horsepower Firestone outboard that one family had trailered up.

The only condition was that we could only use it to troll, not to tear around the lake.

So we would obediently troll for northerns until we got around the point and out of view from the resort.

Then we would reel up our lines, twist open the throttle and tear around the lake — at least to the extent a 7.5-horsepower motor can tear up a lake — searching for fishing hotspots.

Now at trolling speed, the little engine would only sip gas; at full throttle, like most outboards, even that tiny twin-cylinder would drink prodigious amounts of gas/oil mixture.

So at the end of our fishing excursion, we would drag the empty tank up to the resort’s dockside fueling station and ask the dock boy to “charge it.”

Our day of reckoning came on Saturday morning, when our dads went up to the lodge to square things up on the account.

I don’t know how much of the gas we actually used but it must have been a lot.

For one thing, we heard our dads use some words they normally reserved for the company of other male adults.

And for another, no one could afford to stop for lunch on the long drive home.

Now, this was at a time when you could pull into a filling station and ask for a bucks worth, and check the tires and wash the windows while you’re at it, thank you.

Even allowing for the undoubtedly premium dockside prices, I can only imagine how much gas we actually burned that week to get our dads so incensed.