[Public-List] FW: Spring is happening...

Mon Apr 10 11:47:37 PDT 2017

Hi Gord;
I did not receive your first try. It looks like it bounced but I sure am glad I got this retry.  (-:
My regret is that, knowing this would be good, I read it out to Jane.  When I  got to the part about the Pythons her eyes were as big as saucers. I think she was picturing them relocating to a drier place........... like her V-berth !

Cheers,  Rod

-------- Original message --------
From: Gordon Laco via Public-List
Date:10-04-2017 2:11 PM (GMT-05:00)
To: George Dinwiddie via Public-List
Subject: [Public-List] FW: Spring is happening...

Hello George – can you tell me if this went to the list?

Hope you’re well and looking forward to spring.

Gord

From: Gordon Laco <mainstay at csolve.net>
Date: Monday, April 10, 2017 at 1:47 PM
To: Public-List <public-list-bounces at lists.alberg30.org>
Subject: Spring is happening...

Good day friends,

The list has been fairly quiet lately…  perhaps it’s time for a story.

The ice is long gone from the harbour, SURPRISE has had her tarp off for some time now (I always take it off in March, partly to allow the rain to give her decks a wash, and partly to provoke the last snow storm of the winter).

I strolled down to our winter marina yesterday, telling my wife I was going to start spring fitting out work on the boat… keeping to myself the real reason, which was to resolve a mystery that’s been on my mind for the past few weeks.  That is where are SURPRISE’s bronze cowl vents?   I distinctly remember thinking on the day I took the tarp off that I should bring the cowls home to polish them.  I didn’t think about them again for a bit but when I went to look for them in my office and at home, I couldn’t find them.   Casual searches became determined ransacking… no vents.

Yesterday I mounted the ladder and as soon as my eyes were high enough to look over the stern, took a squint forward to see if I’d left them in the cockpit.   No, nothing there.   Sighing, I climbed up into the boat and accidentally glanced forward… there they were, both of them, still in place.

So now I wonder which is worse: to have taken them home and lost them, or to have forgotten I had not taken them home, and spent two weeks looking for them…  let me know what you think.

Happier now, I put the ladder away and strolled back to my car.  I noticed a fair pandemonium going on over at the travel lift.  Five gas and electric powered salvage pumps and every self appointed as well as professional nautical handy man was hard at work on a ramshackle house boat beside the launching bay.   Joining the crowd of onlookers, I learned that the houseboat had been launched the day before, and had sunk.   A house boat sunk?  Good news, you might say, but it gets much better.

The house boat was/is the home of a local ‘artiste of many trades’.   The marina was doing him a favour letting him winter in it on the property.  The house boat’s twin engines are long gone, but thinking swiftly, the artiste realized that once his home was in the water she might be tail light due to the loss of weight… so he piled concrete blocks in to make up what he figured matched the missing engines.

But…  he put a lot more weight in than he should have, and forgot that the advice he received before launching with regard to not having to worry about the empty exhaust pipe transom penetrations being given assuming the stern was high and light…. So the boat sank.

Naturally, he wasn’t around when a passerby noticed the thing was sinking (he’d been there at splash, and declared all well before heading out of town).   So now a big houseboat full of junk is sinking.  Well not full of just junk… the first of the rescuers in the boarding party were somewhat alarmed to discover that there was someone at home in the houseboat after all.    Two very large pythons.   Huge snakes, one thicker around than a man’s thigh, and not very happy about their home sinking …

Man, I couldn’t make this up…

Gord #426 Surprise

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