Some Projects and a Day at the Beach
10 November 2014 | Bayland Marina, Baytown, TX
Jill
We weren’t free to come to the boat at all in October since Jamie was working in the hospital. That didn’t mean nothing got done for the boat, though. I had two main projects for the month.
One was to make a bridle for the piling to which we tie our starboard stern and spring lines. Our boat is on a floating dock. This is one of the safest situations in a storm. The docks ride up and down on very high pilings so your boat and the docks can float up to ride out storm surge. However, to keep our boat off the dock, the starboard side is tied off to a fixed piling. If the storm surge were really high, these lines could hold the boat too tight, causing waves to come on board or the strain to break our lines. A boat next to us had a series of plastic balls strung on the line that went around their piling, so the line would ride up the piling in really high water.
We found the plastic balls available on-line and ordered them. We’d measured the piling before we left the boat last time. I drew a circle on the back porch with Adler’s sidewalk chalk and we put the line with the balls strung on it around the circle. The piling is pretty big and we decided the 9 balls that come in a set wouldn’t go far enough around. So I went to Lowes and bought 4 heavy one-inch PVC pipe couplers and cut them in half and filed and sanded them smooth inside and threaded them on between the balls as spacers. Perfect. Then we tied stopper knots on either side of the array and figured out how big we wanted the loop for the piling. I then made that loop into a circle by putting an eyesplice in the line. On the other end I did a much smaller eyesplice around a large stainless thimble through which we’d thread our dock lines. Once everything was trimmed and finished I had the harness lying on the dock next to Matey in the picture. I’ve put pictures of the thing installed in the gallery, so if my laborious description has confused you, the photos might help. I was pretty proud of it.
My other project for the boat is also in the photo…Matey. Matey and I took training classes. I figure that’s also for the boat, since if Matey is going to come along with us he’ll need to learn some simple commands to keep him safe and happy in all the different situations he’s likely to encounter as a boat dog. We’re doing well with the training, Matey will now sit, and lie down, he’ll go and stay on his mat and he will leave even food alone if I tell him to “leave it”. We’re working on heel, and he will do that for short periods of time, but he has a hard time going as slowly as I do. The most important command is “come” and Matey will come when I call (sometimes after a little extra minute of exploring) but reliably enough that I can now let him off the leash when we’re in a safe place. That’s great for him, because I’ve learned that he loves to run.
October’s projects got done and Jamie had Veterans’ Day off and took a vacation day for today so we had a few days to come down to the boat. We got a few more things done down here, including installing the docking aid I made. Bud also wanted to winterize the little outboard. It hasn’t been really run since we got here, so we launched the dinghy and put it on and Matey got his first dinghy ride. He was so good about it, and I think he liked it.
Today we went back to Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge to see if we could see some migrating birds. We were disappointed; we didn’t see big flocks of anything except coots. (I don’t think they were migrating, though.) We did see monarch butterflies, probably on the final leg of their journeys.
Then we went down to an undeveloped beach and let Matey run. And run he did. He spied some shore birds and tried to run them down. He ran right into the water and didn’t stop until the waves stopped him. I managed to get a couple of pictures of him tearing after some birds, unfortunately once I got the camera out he was running into the afternoon sun, so the lighting wasn’t great. He’s pretty tired tonight.
It was a pretty nice trip to the boat, but we are missing Scott and Tamera on Kooky Dance, who have now made it in their cruise as far as Clearwater. Wish we were there!!