Cars and more debris

Well, today is certainly not going how I planned it. Sometimes one just has to go with the flow, or as I like to call it these days: "Let go and let God." My poor stepson has had a run of bad luck and just as some light is shinning at the end of the tunnel, his car died in my driveway after he dropped Trenton off for the day. So now I have Trenton AND his father here for the day.

I am fortunate to have many friends and contacts locally, so my resources were not strained at all in finding a mechanic who will come and diagnose the problem with the car in a couple of hours.

I set Trenton and his Dad up in the Family Room with one of the new DVD’s that I bought the other day and I sneaked back here to the computer room to share another story with all of you. For those of you with dial-up service, my apologies if this takes a long time to load. There will be a lot of pictures.

Oh, hang on a minute, the mechanic just rang my doorbell.

Ok, it’s now a quarter ‘til four in the afternoon. My friend diagnosed the car and took the starter off. I took the starter into town to another acquaintance. He didn’t have a rebuilt one on the shelf, but he will have that one rebuilt for me by noon tomorrow at a cost of $75.00. This guy does good work and has a sterling reputation. The car will stay in the driveway for the night.

Now, back to the story. I wrote an entry on debris that got pulled out of the river a few entries back, and I thought that would take care of that subject nicely. Wrong. You have got to see this piece of debris that floated into the marina and became a huge headache for my crew and me!

A dock nearby fell into the water and pieces started floating with the tidal currents. I called the Coast Guard, however, other than broadcasting a warning to mariners they could do nothing about it. I then called the Department of Natural Resources and reported it. Two days later an agent showed up and I took them for a grand tour of the dilapidatedstructure. They were amazed that the owner would let it get to that point and wrote a letter to the property owner demanding that the structure be removed in a timely fashion. Mean while, chunks keep breaking off and floating my way.

 

This is what the dock looked like before and after the collapse.

This is a picture of me and the County Marine Patrol guys.

The roof of the dock house on the fallen structure wedged itself underneath one of the boats at our place and I called them to make an incident report in case an insurance claim had to be filed by the boat owner.

The roof was finally dislodged from under the boat and tied up at my dock. What to do with it was the topic of discussion for an entire weekend. On Monday, two weeks ago, I went in on my day off and moved the roof with a couple of boats around to the hoist to be lifted out and hauled off to the dump. Because it was a day off, I did not wear my regular work outfit, opting for a Tee shirt and a baseball style hat instead. I did not want to mess up my normal gear because of this mess.

The plan was to tow with one boat and use the boat with the rubber sides to keep between the roof and the boats docked at the marina so no damage would occur if they bumped. Thiswas very tricky, but it worked.

I decided I needed to be on the boat with the rubber sides, so I made my assistant change boats with me.

 

Once out in the river, we untied the towboat and both used our boats as bumper type boats to push it around to the other side of our property to the hoist. It did not want to cooperate, LOL!

 

 

I saw this guy coming by and thought he might help. No such luck, LOL!

Does this look like I am determined?

 

I am attaching a line to the roof.

 

Here the hoist is starting to lift the roof

 

 

Now that it’s out of the water, look at the size of this thing.

I could not believe that our director of maintenance was going to tow it to the back of the property with this little trailer and his golf cart, but it worked (just barely).

 

This is the final resting-place before the chainsaws came out of their cases and this was bundled off to the dump.

My apologies to those with Dialup Service if this took forever to load.  I just thought Y'all might enjoy seeing this whole process.

On a final note, I am still picking up pieces of this dock every day because the owner hasn’t fully removed it yet.