On June 30th, I went with my good friend Beya and our youngest borns, to Clear Creek to Paddleboard. The wind was strong. The water was murky. The sun was hot. We managed to make it around the reeds but no further. When I emerged from the water, I found a horrifying sight. My paddleboard fin had come out of its socket and had fallen to the reservoir floor. Max and Ian searched the mud for it, but it was nowhere to be found. No worries, I thought. That’s what Amazon is for. But this fin is particular. It has little notches to anchor the fin (not so well if you don’t slide the lock all the way through). I called CA Paddleboards. They haven’t made that kind in years. Someone in Utah had just lost his and they’d had to share the disappointing news to him. Erik wasn’t happy. He teased that maybe I could go to the Maker Lab at NAU to get a new one printed. That seemed impossible to me. Farfetched to him. I searched the internet as deeply as the boys searched Clear Creek river. Nada. There was none. So I called the Maker Lab people. I learned Tinkercad. I tinkered and prototyped and screwed up measurements. Zoe kept telling me I needed calipers. Max, who told me when I had almost finished drawing the fin, having bruised my head hitting it against the wall of three dimensional learning, “oh yeah. I learned Tinkercad in science last year.” I made one fin. It was too small. I made another fin. The notches were in the wrong place. I made another fin. The base was too wide. But five prototypes later, I finally have a fin that slides into the notch inside the Paddleboard. Perhaps it will warm up enough for us to make it to the water one more time before winter.