Sure to forget something ...

My friend Paul and I are  rolling out for the St. Johns River a week from Tuesday. Now is the time for all the advance work necessary for having a carefree boating experience. For example:

• New wheel bearings on the trailer
• Lubricated engine throttle and transmission linkages
• Checked coolant level
• Checked oil
• Adjusted alternator/raw water pump belt
• Cleaned raw water strainer
• Back-flushed raw water intake hose and valve
• Lubricated raw water intake ball valve
• Adjusted stuffing box
• Checked shaft coupler bolts/nuts
• Checked sanitary system
• Started and tested the 1000-watt generator
• Got the outboard and the inflatable dinghy out of storage
• Surveyed the safety gear

The piloting routes are already plotted and in the GPS. I have a meals plan (heavy on restaurants).We also have a float plan for the spouses, showing where and when we expect to be, along with telephone numbers.

Still to do:

• Marina reservations
• Load bedding and towels
• Grocery list, shopping
• Check electronics gear and ground tackle
• Exterior scrubdown and interior vacuuming
• Fill the fresh water tank
• Load and stow personal gear and food.
• Ice the cooler.

My brother Boris, who moved from Atlanta to New Mexico, bought a cowboy hat and is therefore entitled to feel free on the range, never fails to write and suggest I get professional help for all my preparatory list making. Maybe he is right, but I would rather deal with this stuff now than later.

I know I'll forget something, but I'm unlikely, with my lists, to forget everything.

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.