Wildlife strikes again

Please recall that the spring resurrection of our ski boat went off-schedule week before last due to a reptile intrusion. We had to make sure a snake we had spied was no longer under the canvas boat cover piled on the dock.

This took about a week, with the canvas cover off the boat, to make sure the snake had left the area. Finally, Dia and I returned to work Wednesday afternoon.

The first discoveries of the day were two neat piles of mammal scat on a seat in the ski boat's bow. The culprits could have been small gorillas. More likely, they were river otters.

Adorable creatures, aren't they?

Using my considerable wilderness skills to analyze the droppings, I determined the otters were long gone. Work could proceed.

We scrubbed, vacuumed, cleaned windows, polished instrument lenses...

...until we sensed something wrong.


There was this pervasive, disgusting aroma. A search for the source lead to an under-seat life jacket locker. Inside, on top of a bed of dock lines, we found a reeking pile of coarse scales, two bone-clean gill plates and a largely-intact fish tail.

These were, beyond a doubt, the decomposing 3-days-old remains of  a fairly large river carp. Our otter visitors must have captured the carp and dined well, then moved on, leaving only meal scraps and fecal deposits.


We hauled the ski boat  yesterday afternoon and it now sits on its trailer by our front gate.


First thing this morning, it's going downtown to the Dazzling Car Care detail shop for a complete cleaning and waxing. I hope they don't find any more troubling wildlife in that boat.  It wouldn't surprise me, however,  if they discovered an anaconda or an alligator. Wild creatures seem attracted to our boats.


Meanwhile, in  cruise news,  Ms. Bettencourt's trailer has been completely serviced and the little trawler herself is about 80 percent loaded for a trip to the St. Johns River in Florida. My friend Paul and I will be trailering  the boat South from here early in June.

Detailed planning and marina arrangements will begin this week.

 Please check back for more about the trip in future posts.

Mr. No Shoulders slows boat work

I once worked for a major Southern newspaper that had a firm policy:  No snake news. No snake pictures. As a young reporter, I was told "our readers don't want snakes with their morning papers." So, if you are of that persuasion, don't read any farther.

It is a fact that if you live near water in the Southern states, snake encounters are almost everyday occurrences. I think snakes are frightening on some visceral level, but my policy is non-confrontational. I am wary, and when I encounter long reptiles, I usually just wait for them to go away. That's why I got almost no boat work done this week.

The creature that stopped action this time was a green water snake. He's non-venomous, but known to bite and leave victims with wound-site bacterial infections. I had taken the cover off our ski boat to begin spring cleaning. It seemed like only minutes later, that I saw about three feet of snake disappear under the piled up canvas boat cover.

Wikipedia

The green water snake shown at right, from Mississippi, is actually rather small as green water snakes go. There is a Florida variety of  green water snake that herpetologists  believe to be the largest native snake in North America, some getting to be 6 feet long.

The late Belle, who was our 13-pound Silky Terrier, once cornered a specimen  in our garage that turned out to stretch to 5 feet, 5 1/2 inches, nose to tail tip.
I had to shoot that one, because it wouldn't go away. (The snake, not the dog).

Anyway, this week, I chose to ignore the creature under the canvas. I did some more boat cleaning, then left the dock. Then I started worrying about whether he might have friends. I began to envision my boat dock and that  pile of canvas as a possibly attractive unwanted snake habitat.

Something had to be done. I thought about it all week, then made an approach early one cool morning, with an oar at the ready.

Right away, I noticed something in a pile of rope that didn't look like a rope.

Click this photo to enlarge it, and you'll see a snake skin winding through the lines toward the canvas in the upper left part of the picture.




Emboldened by the idea that freshly de-skinned snake wouldn't hang around the dock, I flipped the canvas, and found only this:

I tried to stretch the skin out without breaking it up. (The gloves are in the picture for a sense of scale).

A measurement showed this guy was about five feet long when he discarded his scaly suit.

I assume he became longer and fatter, and therefore needed to shed. He's probably still around here someplace, still growing toward a record dimension.




Lesson learned:  Don't leave piles of canvas and other such reptile-attracting stuff laying around the docks.

Making the best of it

Click photo for a sinking feeling

On the river this afternoon

Sadly, ceaseless rain and wind have doomed the Southport cruise. I called my friend Major and cancelled Tuesday night. Weather cleared briefly the next day, then went back to nasty and has stayed there. It's still sputtering rain with winds gusting to 30 knots. So, that was a good call.

Due to various calendar issues, the Southport trip won't happen this summer.  Next up is an excursion up the St. Johns River from Welaka to Sanford, FL, and perhaps beyond. My friend Paul will be aboard for that voyage. We are planning to leave in early June, and we're (optimistically) counting on  warm and sunny weather.

So, the month until then could be used to start the middle cabin rehab project.

The dashboard needs sanding and repainting. To do this, it will be necessary to remove the engine controls, the instrument panel and a number of switches. The compass, the depth sounder and the GPS bracket and wiring will also have to be removed. That's a lot of work.  It's probably more than can be accomplished in the 30 days or so before we head south. However ...

...I could start at the aft end of the middle cabin and work forward, leaving the dashboard work to some later date. The back-to-front surface prep and paint job would be doable in the time available.

I think I'll re-pack the trailer wheel bearings and think about it some more.

Cruise time! (Rain predicted)

Ms. Bettencourt is cruise ready. My friend Major and I will give the trailer a once-over this  morning, then we'll haul the boat this afternoon or tomorrow. It is raining now.

We plan to be on the road to Georgetown, SC., Monday morning. The forecast says it will be raining. We are not distressed. We have come to understand that one of us is a Rain Jonah and this cannot be helped. Eventually, we will be on the water bound for Bald Head Island near Southport, NC. (in the rain).

On the chart and GPS, the route looks like a long and boring slog up the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Major, who is an optimist, says we will probably see some interesting wildlife. I understand it is mating season for Painted Buntings and that the whole Painted Bunting Nation has flown in from Cuba to make merry in the marshes and brushy woodlands along the South Carolina coastline.


I hope we see some of these guys, plus the usual ospreys and, perhaps, some bald eagles.

Meanwhile, Bettelou, my yoga  instructor and fitness advisor at the Family Y, has learned that we will be away on a cruise all week. She most graciously devised a daily boat exercise routine to help keep us fit during the arduous voyage. (Perhaps someone told her that each leg of this trip begins and ends at a seafood restaurant).

Anyway, here's the routine, illustrated by Bettelou herself:

This workout utilizes a medicine ball or weights, and includes various rotations, chops, figure-8s, lunges, squats, jacknifes and twists.

I have some ankle weights I once used for leg extensions while watching television. They will be aboard for this cruise.

I am serious about this.






Major, however,  may find this to be un-nautical, unworthy, or worse.

On the other hand, we could agree that a workout will help pass the time while we slowly motor north-- in the rain.

Pondering tides and currents

One of the nice things my friend Major did before he left for the Lesser Antilles last week was to make marina reservations for our long-planned cruise to Southport, NC.

So, while Major and Linda are day-tripping on an Americas Cup vessel somewhere near Sint Maarten, I am at work calculating departure/arrival times for the various legs of the Southport trip.

That's when I realized Major's first marina reservation is about 60 miles away from our starting point. Ms. Bettencourt is a 6-knot boat (on a good day). Do the arithmetic: Georgetown, SC, to Myrtle Beach, our first destination, equals about 10 hours steaming time -- if tides and currents prove amenable.

Suddenly, predictive information about tides and currents becomes more important. If we don't time things right, we could be plodding up the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway interminably. We could run out of Doublestuff Oreo Cookies before we get to our first overnight stop. Major gets cranky when this happens. So do I.

Wikipedia

The tidal range in the Bay of Fundy can be as much as 17 meters. Tidal information is probably really important here.

Long dock lines must be a big help too.











The first time I really needed tide and current data was a winter in 1980something. I was planning a  springtime cruise from Morehead City, NC, to Savannah, GA. I found an order form and sent it with a check to some bureau in Washington. Eventually, a thick book of tide tables for various locations in my area of interest arrived in the mailbox.

In the last decade, the same data, in a more timely and more accessible format, have become available on the Internet. Most modern marine GPS units also provide the information, but I find that wringing it out of my Garmin unit, if  I am not physically in the area of interest, is a tedious and frustrating process.

So I went to Google on the PC, expecting to find a link to some government site that would provide tables to interpolate tides and currents from prime stations along the US East Coast. Perhaps there was a link to such a site, but I never got there. I was diverted by a citation for a cellphone app entitled, appropriately, "Tides and Currents." It is free, so what the heck? I hit download.

The result was amazing. First, I get a box that says something like "your Android devices can operate this app," quickly followed by advice that "Tides and Currents has been sent to your mobile device and your Nexus-7 tablet."

How did they even know I have a Nexus tablet? How could they find it, much less send it an app? I sprinted for the kitchen where both the cellphone and the Nexus tablet were last seen. It was true! The Tides and Currents apps were there -- on both devices.






Don't ask me how this got on my  tablet










And, not only is it magic, this app actually works. It's remarkably easy to use, intuitive, searchable and acceptably accurate.

So, now I know how tides and currents will effect that long first leg of our cruise to Southport: As best I can calculate from my new Tides and Currents app, not much. It's going to be a long, hard slog no matter what.

As a precaution, we'll load extra Oreos.

Could there be such a thing...

...as too much boat stuff?

Today, I planted the vegetable garden, cleaned out the fish pond, introduced four big new Comets to the water feature, listened to Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash and ran my Lab Gladstone a mile or so with the bicycle.

Ms. Bettencourt is sitting at her dock with a nice coat of pollen all over.

Life is good.

Maybe some boat stuff next week.

Demanding schedule: 1 trip ends; 3 more planned

Ms. Bettencourt made her first overnight cruise of the season this week. Our 12-year-old granddaughter and I went about 15 miles downstream to the New Savannah Bluff Lock and Dam. We debarked and had a closeup look at the 75-year-old structure. Back on the water, we found an anchorage and settled in for her first night on the River. Fried chicken, Oreo cookies and a few totally-truthful sea stories ended a very nice day.

The granddaughter seems to have had an enjoyable experience and the boat performed perfectly.






Later this month, my friend Major and I will load Ms. Bettencourt on her trailer for a road trip to Georgetown, SC. The plan is to launch there, then proceed up the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway to Southport, NC, with an intermediate overnight at Myrtle Beach, SC. We should be home by May 3, which will allow about a month for boat work and painting before the next trip.

My friend Paul will be joining me in the first week of June for that voyage. We will trailer to Welaka, FL, on the St. Johns River, then meander south up the (northward flowing) St. Johns. We'll stop at Hontoon Island for an overnight, then press on to the metropolis of Sanford on Lake Monroe.

After that, I'll be looking for buddy for a trip down the Savannah River to Savannah, and on to Beaufort, SC.

The cruiser's schedule is indeed demanding.

Tough work, but someone has to do it. (Smile).