Another spring storm is upon us and as
per usual the wind is blowing the rain in defiance of gravity. I
spent the morning assisting a friend with the tarp on his boat; we
had tempted fate the week prior in an attempt to keep his boat dry,
(so that deck repairs could ensue) when we foolishly covered it with
a blue tarp. I have always stood in wonderment when one of
these “destined for the landfill” tarps stayed in place; I have
seen this phenomenon only a few times when visiting friends so
blessed as to live in an area of sufficient shelter as to allow for
only the faintest of breezes . When we lived on our farm the wind had
its way with anything that was not properly secured, as a tarp of
that kind is incapable of being properly secured they were not often
used. The few examples about, in the form of remnants shredded and
tattered clinging to a barbwire fence on some forsaken hill, served
as a warning to those contemplating their use. It appears that I like
to live in such areas or more plausibly am not bright enough to live
in more gentle climes, for now I live in another tarp molesting area
of equal if not greater potency.
Note to self: If an area has hurricane
force winds that are not called hurricane force winds and therefore
not really even news worthy to the local residents... don't move
there!
As I stood there in my rubberized rain
gear, the kind the commercial fishermen use up here in Alaska, and
felt the wet spots beginning to seep through my hoodie I wondered why
we had thought that tarping the boat would work. It had never worked
for me in the past, and now I was fighting what I knew in my heart
from the start would be the inevitable conclusion to our struggles.
We'd used a center pole on the flybridge to hold the center of the
tarp up in an effort to shed the rain but at some point in the night
this pole had fallen allowing the formation of a pool. Not a shallow
pool mind you for the flybridge was surrounded by railings about
thirty inches in height; we had a pool the size of a large hot tub to
contend with. It seems when you are faced with difficult jobs the
jokes start to flow and in true fashion my friend turns to me and
says, “Maybe we should just buy a water heater and use it as a
jacuzzi.”
No amount of joking was going to fix
our deep predicament though, and it was time to remedy our shallow
foresight. I brought a hose over to the boat placing one end in the
pool and the other on the dock, I began to suck. Or in more technical
terms: to create a low pressure on one end of the hose allowing the
higher pressure of the atmosphere to force the water up and over the
side of the flybridge giving gravity the opportunity to take over
siphoning the pool empty. Evidently sucking is not one of my
strengths as no matter how hard I tried I could only get a trickle to
start then watch with fading amusement as it slowly petered out.
Attempt after attempt failed till my mouth hurt from the sucking;
that is when I found out that my friend had been placing the hose end
too close to the tarp and as I drew in water the tarp would seal off
the hose thus stopping the flow. Finally using one of the spigot
hoses on the dock to back flush the hose, filling it so that when the
full hose was allowed to flow it would start the siphoning and the
pool could be drained. The water was finally flowing from the deck to
where it had always belonged and now it was time to wait. You learn
quickly in this weather that you don't ever face the wind directly,
instead taking the stance of a scolded child looking this way and
that but never at the persecutor, for if you do you'll bear the full
brunt of their wrath and in this case cold and very wet! As I waited
it gave me the time to reflect on how much I despise these blue
devils and to wonder how a store could sell them in good conscious in
a climate as this and how I had once again let myself be
suckered into using one against my better judgment. These thoughts
poured through my mind as heavily as the rain hit me from all sides,
the flow stopped in the hose and I heard my friend call that the pool
was empty.
We
climbed into the flybridge, secured the center pole and called it a
day. Walking down the dock through the horizantal deluge back to
Nadejda it
made me thankful I had spent all
the time stopping the leaks that so greatly inflicted her after we
bought her so that I no longer needed any of those blasted blue
tarps!
