A sunken ship?

Ah those various tasks of fall – particularly those of fall when you live at the lake – such as taking in the boat and the dock. 




Our boat is pretty basic.  
Unbelievably basic.  
So basic in fact that there are no seats except for whoever is driving, and even that is more of a box covered with carpeting.  For the rest of us it is lawn chairs on the aluminum checker plate deck.  Now this baby has served us well – but fancy it ain’t.


This year we also had a bit of an oops (having a few of those this year apparently).  There was an amazing wind storm when I was here alone for a few days and after things settled down I didn’t think to check on the boat.  It is a pontoon boat, so what can go wrong?  
Well apparently it can sink  …
Turns out one of the mooring lines undid (somehow) and the boat twisted around with the result that one pontoon was rubbing on the sand bottom (it is very shallow where we keep the boat), and it was beating a bit against the shore, in that nasty wind and the resulting waves .  The end result? - a pontoon with a hole (an opened repair actually) and a whole bunch of sand inside.  Rats !  Project for next year I think.  (or a reason to get a boat with seats perhaps???) But it still had to come out of the water.
Again - enter our orange friend (can you tell we really like our friend?) and the entire boat gets dragged up on the shore.  We are pretty lucky that we have an area that we can do this, shallow water and a gentle slope down to the shore.  The actual shore is completely natural, so no ramp but hey, we aren't into fancy anyway.  So not elegant, and probably not the easiest thing on the pontoons.  Our next boat will have a trailer I promise. 






We also needed to get the dock out of the water.  You may be wondering what on earth were we thinking still having the boat and dock in the water in late October???  This is Canada after all.  It was not total laziness, honest.  We had left all this stuff in place so that we could take some friends who were visiting in late October out for a boat ride, which we love to do – but given that the boat was on the bottom (next to the dock)  at the time they arrived that ride did not happen.  It did mean however that to get the dock out of the lake we were walking in very cold water (Gasp!).

The result was that the dock got hauled out pronto !!  We are actually getting better and better at this task each year.  When we first got the dock getting it out took quite a while.  Over the years we have figured out that less and less stuff has to be taken apart and the whole thing can be removed in a couple of pieces, and with only a few bolts removed (all while standing in the water of course).

Safe to say that both water devices are safely on shore for the winter.  Our final close up activity will be all the water systems. 

Which we are also getting better at.



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