Hats Off To You!

So many of you who follow this journal on a regular basis have written to me asking questions about the hat I’m pictured wearing in the “About Me” section on the upper left hand side of this page.  I’ve decided to delay for a post or two showing more pictures of my Florida vacation.  Don’t worry, there are more great pictures to show and I will be sharing them here, just not yet.

 

Every spring, my thoughts turn towards my summer wardrobe for my job on the docks.  I like to wear the loose fitting Columbia Fishing Shirts with the netted inserts on the left and right side of the back.  They are durable, comfortable, and the netted inserts allow for greater air circulation and help keep me cool.  I order a full week’s worth of new ones each spring.

 

My chief concern each year, though, is my hat.  I am out in the direct sunlight so much I really have to have just the right hat to protect me from the UV rays and to give my eyes the proper shading.  This requires a hat with a wide brim which, under normal circumstances, might be very hot to wear.  That’s where the mesh top comes into play.

 

I found a hat six years ago which has become my trademark on the docks where I work.  I have clients of the marina who bump into me all the time at the store who do not recognize me because I am not wearing my trademark hat.  The hat is made by Dorfman Pacific and I purchase a new one each year.

 

What may be interesting, though, is how I prep the hat before I put it into service each year.  I treat it with a fabric guard and waterproofing solution.

 

A couple of years ago I was able to get hold of a couple of Styrofoam wig forms that are used to store a wig when the wig is not in use.  These are excellent to place the hat on while waiting for the hat to dry after treatment.

 

 

 

First you saturate the hat totally with the treatment, after which it must be put in direct sunlight to dry.  The hat must be totally dry and then you repeat the treatment and drying process.  Do this a third time and your hat is guaranteed to be waterproof and to be able to endure the abuse of a full summer season and still look good and repel water in a hard rain.  This year I used a product by 303 named fabric guard.  I used this same product last year and was pleased with the results.  This is a picture of this year’s hat with the product.

 

 

Okay, okay!  Absolutely nobody wrote and asked me about my hat.  I just wanted to tell you anyway!

 

On a different note, I was running around the marina the other day and looked up and saw sun rays beaming down from the center of a huge cloud mass.  I grabbed my camera and took two shots of it.  The close-up one seems dramatic to me and I wanted you all to see it.

 

 

 

That’s about all for this time.  Except that I will probably be working seven days a week for a couple of weeks.  My New assistant at work broke his ankle on one of his days off this week and who knows how long it will be before he can hobble around the marina.  I’ll have to work straight through until the rest of my summer help gets out of school.  See y’all next time!  Stay safe and well!

Vacation

Where does one begin?  I did not mean to leave this space untended for this long, however, fast moving events swept me up and carried me away.  Now I have a few stories to share.

 

First let me just say that I’ve missed all my friends here in J-land.  I’ve missed reading your posts and keeping current with all the happenings in this community.  I’ve missed sharing with you about what’s been happening in my world, too.

 

A couple of days after I wrote my last post, I got a memo from our Human Resources Department telling me to use 48 hours of vacation time by the third week of May or lose them.  We can only carry over so many weeks of vacation time each year and any extra must be used up by our anniversary date with the company.

 

I looked at the calendar on my desk and quickly realized that, due to upcoming events at work, I needed to use this vacation time the following week or I would have to forfeit it.  A quick meeting with my boss and it was confirmed.  I’d have nine days off starting that coming Monday.

 

My first plan was to just loaf around the house for a week doing a few chores and catching up on some reading and goofing off.  A call from my friend Ken the next evening had Paulette and I planning to meet Ken and Joyce for the following weekend in Daytona, Florida.  We picked Daytona as a half-way spot between our respective homes.

 

Sunday night after work, I walked in and found Paulette and Ken talking on the phone.  Ken and Joyce would not be able to go to Daytona the following weekend because of some health problems of their aging, but beloved pet dog, Valentine.  It seems that in my absence, Paulette and Ken decided I should drive down to Vero Beach for that week.  The thought was that I should finish the vacation that had been interrupted last October when I left early to return home before an impending hurricane made landfall. You can read about that trip in my archives for October 2005, if you like.  Paulette did not have any vacation time left so I’d be going by myself again.

 

That’s how I found myself once again on a tropical beach swimming and enjoying a cool beer in the hot sun.

 

 

 

 

With nothing to rush my visit this time, we decided to explore as many of the spoil islands in the area as we could.  This is a shot of Ken on one of the prettiest little islands we visited checking his messages from work.

 

 

I was having a blast and we saw some great spots for return visits.

 

 

We discovered that you can adopt an island if you wanted to help in keeping these islands clean and pretty.  Here’s Tom, Ken’s dad standing beside a sign explaining the program.

 

 

I, as you can see, am enjoying every minute of the adventure.

 

 

We needed to keep our strength up, so we foundour way to the Ft. Pierce City Marina and took sustenance at the Tiki Hut Restaurant located on the property.  Ponce De Leon would have loved to discover this place.  The adult beverages had great rejuvenating powers.

 

 

After lunch and a few beverages, it was back to the arduous task of finding more island beaches to swim and play at.  On some of the islands we made interesting discoveries such as these two stumps the locals have been carving on for years.

 

 

Here’s a shot of Ken on yet another island.  Notice the stump in the clearing behind him.  This one had been carved on and then it had been scorched on purpose with fire to give it a very eerie effect.  I love making these little discoveries.  Each new island had some distinct little secret to be revealed.

 

 

This is how we finished out our day before returning home to hot showers and some excellent hospitality.

 

 

There’s more of my trip to share next time and I’ve visited an interesting shipyard here in Savannah that I want to tell you about.  I hope you are all doing well and enjoying some excellent spring weather.

Dredging Operations

Our Marina is located on a salt water tidal river.   Because it is connected to and fed by the ocean, it ebbs and flows with the tide.  I share this with you so that you might understand the huge volume of water that rushes in from the ocean for six hours then rushes back out again.  Our tidal changes average out to be about seven feet.  Sometimes it’s higher than that and sometimes a little bit less.  The speed of this current flow is four and a half miles per hour at peak and dead calm at slack.

 

This movement of unbelievable quantities of water is a huge force to be reckoned with.  It moves things, particularly the silt and soil that the banks and bottom are made of.  This causes shoaling in certain areas and washouts in others.  The banks of these tidal rivers shift continually.

 

Our marina is subject to this shoaling and we have to dredge out the bottom about every ten years to keep the depth in and around the marina deep enough.  To do this effectively is a huge engineering feat and takes careful measurements, planning, and execution.

 

The first problem is where does one put all the mud and silt that we are going to suck up off the bottom to make the river deeper?  There are very rigid regulations concerning an operation like this and the permitting process is a long and drawn out affair involving the Corps of Engineers and the department of Natural Resources.  The process usually takes about two years just to obtain the proper permits.  The permit is not granted without a detailed account of how you are going to dispose of the spoil material.

 

There are three means of disposing spoil material legally.  One, you have a piece of land designated as a spoil area where you pump the material onto.  Two, you haul the material away by trucks to an approved spoil area.  Three, you pile the material onto a barge and ship it out to sea to an approved spoil area and dump it in the ocean.  In our case, we own the island across the creek from the marina and have kept it for many, many years as a designated spoil area.

 

Two months before the dredging operation began, a huge barge was brought to the shore of the island and heavy equipment was unloaded to plow and shape the area to receive the spoil material.  The area is surrounded by a tall dyke and shaped so the spoil material settles on one side and the water drains to the other and is filtered, clean, back into the river or creek.

 

Here are two aerial views of our spoil area.  The dredging had already begun when these were taken and you can see the solid material accumulating on the one side as the water settles to the other and drains.

 

  

 

The challenge for me, as Dock Master, during the dredging project is to clear the boats out of sections of the marina to allow the dredge to operate in the marina safely without the risk of damaging the boats. Moving the boats also allows the dredge to dig out areas where the boats would normally dock. Here is a picture of the dredging equipment tied up in an area where I had just moved out all the boats.  Notice the boats still left in the marina.

 

 

Here is another shot from a different angle.

 

 

The way the manager of the dredging operations and I worked out the plan, each section we cleared out would take about one week to complete.  So, each week, I had to clear out a section of the marina and park the boats in other parts of the marina.  Then, a week later, I had to move those boats back to their spots and clear out the next section to be dredged.  Here is a shot of the next section to be dredged after the section shown above.  Notice the boats have been moved back to the right side of the right hand dock and the lack of boats in the area between these two docks.

 

 

The equipment for this kind of operation can be just as interesting as the operation itself.  The company we hired for the job had a small little tugboat custom made for them to use with their dredging barge.  Here is a shot of “The Mighty Mouse” tug.  The tug was aptly named!

 

 

This next photo is a shot of the dredging barge shot from the rear.  The little skiff and the Mighty Mouse are docked in front of the barge.  The dredging barge has no engine for propulsion.  It is moved around by the tug and the little skiff.  The tall things that look like legs are called spuds.  Each spud is dropped down and digs into the bottom to hold the dredging barge in place to allow it to dig up a particular area.

 

 

The barge has an arm that moves up and down and can be manipulated to the right and to the left.  On the end of that arm is a rotating drill head with a pipe in the center of the drill head.  The drill head digs up the bottom and the pipe sucks up the material much the same as a vacuum cleaner would suck up dirt.

 

 

Here is a close up shot of the drilling head.  I’ve seen steel pipe that was laying on the bottom that was cut clean in two when hit with this drill head.  It is driven with awesome power and really did a great job in our marina.

 

 

Marina operations had to continue all during the dredging operations and I was continually radioing instructions to boats who were trying to get past the dredge while dredging was taking place.  The dredging in the creek, where all the above pictures were taken, is completed and they are now dredging out front in the river portion of the marina.  The entire project should be wrapped up in another two weeks, just in time for our summer boating season.

 

The dredging operation progressed through our marina in a very calm and orderly fashion.  This was due to great planning and good execution on the part of the marina staff as well as the dredging staff.  I am very pleased with the outcome and am already receiving congratulations from my boss on a job well done.  I have to say, though, that I am very glad this has to be done only once every ten years.

 

I’m going to leave you with one more aerial shot of the spoil island only because I think it’s pretty and I wanted to squeeze it in.

 

 

Today is my lovely wife's birthday and she has taken the day off.  I have plied Paulette with cards and gifts and will escort her later to the restaurant of her choice.  I think we're going to have a nice meal and a great time.  I hope you all have a great week!

A Bit Of A Bug!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted.  I wish I could say that I have just been very busy and only now have had time to sit down and write.  That actually is true, but there is more to the story.  We have been sick here, very sick.  I came down with it first, only a couple of days after my last post.  Paulette got it about five days later and Sandy had a brush with it, too, although she never had the cough and congestion that Paulette and I contracted.

 

This bug has been going around.  My doctor says it’s a virus but did not call it the flu.  Many who have had it that I know have referred to it as the flu.  First you start aching and get a fever.  These symptoms are soon joined by diarrhea, upset stomach and then the most massive cold type symptoms I’ve experienced in years.  Your chest is filled with congestion and it’s hard to breath.  The first several days of this and you can’t lie down to sleep at night because of the sensation of a very heavy weight on your chest and the wheezing.  It feels as though you will suffocate if you lie down.  The recliner was my salvation and later helped Paulette, too.

 

Paulette ended up going to the doctor twice and the emergency room once.  I got off with just two trips to the doctor.  Thank God it’s over for me and Paulette is on the tail end of it.

 

Of course, it could not have come at a worse time for me.  I mentioned in my last post that this is always a busy time of year for me at the marina.  I generally lose my assistant every year just before the marina goes into the longer hours of operation that stretches through summer and beyond.  It’s usually not because they are unhappy; they just realize that there is little room for promotion.  I plan on keeping this job for some time to come and they want to move on to a position somewhere that offers more room for growth.  This year was no exception.

 

I cannot tell you how much fun it was interviewing applicants while I sat there sweating with fever and working seven day work weeks a couple of weeks in a row.  I was able to take two days off at the beginning of the illness, but then I had to work straight through this past Sunday.  I am well now and recovered.  I have a newly hired, but quickly trained, assistant with two more new hires starting mid week this week. 

 

Yesterday was a day filled with three weeks worth of errands and chores.  Today I get to rest and finally post a new entry in this journal.  Oh, don’t bother suggesting I take a flu shot next year.  I already plan to.  I hate shots, but if it will prevent what I just went through, sign me up!

 

Under the very best of circumstances, I don’t do sick well.  To have to work expanded hours while I was sick and seven days a week, to boot, really put me off my game.  I have not been online longer than it takes to do a quick check of Email over the past few weeks.  I have not been able to concentrate on this small screen long enough to read journals so I have not even tried.  I hope to remedy that now that I’m felling better and I hope to be around soon to visit all my friends’ journals and, of course I’ll try to leave comments again.

 

During all of this the dredging project at the marina has been under way.  I’ll do a post very soon and share some interesting pictures I’ve been able to put together to show you how it’s been going.  By the way, the manager of the dredging project came down with the same bug I had. He is recovering now but had to work through most of the illness, too. 

 

Look for another post from me either later today or, if not, by Friday night, for sure.  I’ve got some aerial shots of the dredging project that are really cool and I think you’ll enjoy seeing them.  In the meantime, take care and watch out for this bug that’s going around.  It’s a killer!

 

 

It was a year ago this month that “Dock Lines …,” the journal, was conceived.  I did not actually start the journal until April because I was much too busy in March to implement my ideas for my journal and get it all set up and working.  It was not just a case of procrastination, I now realize.  March is a busy month for me.  However, here we are once again and, busy as I’ve been, I feel it’s time to pause and catch this journal up with what’s been going on in my life.

 

Trenton has moved to Oregon to rejoin his mother and father.  In the last post that I talked of Trenton, I made a huge error when I typed that he would leave March 22.  I should have typed February 22.  I did not go back and correct it as I did not realize the mistake until days later.

 

We have heard from Trenton several times since the move and he is fine and enjoying new friends and his new home.  His mom and dad are doing well, he assures us, and he is happy.  He is well ahead of the other children in his new class I am told, so his new school is not too hard of an adjustment.

 

His departure took quite an emotional toll on our household.  It took a few weeks to get used to a routine that did not revolve around a seven year old.  We have adjusted now and are doing fine.  I am sure Trenton will let us know if he needs us in the future and all any of us can do now is pray that the little guy has a good life ahead of him.  But, yes!  We miss him dearly!

 

A new season approaches at the marina and there has been much doings getting ready for it.  We are in the process of dredging out the marina to make it deeper.  I’ll fill you in on that project in an upcoming post.  This week I want to share with you the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Deep South Regatta that was held at our marina this past weekend.

 

This regatta is for Lightning sailboats only.  They are nineteen feet long and are manned by a crew of three persons during a race.  It is called a one-design race meaning every boat entered is of the same design.  This is the first stop on the annual Lightning race circuit each year and we try and kick off their racing season in a big way for them.  We are told continually that we are the best stop for them each year offering the finest facility and friendliest staff on the entire circuit.

 

Just to give you some idea of the circuit, the teams are from all over the United States, and one team even comes each year fromChile.  After Savannah, they drive down to Miami for a series of races the following weekend.  They travel up and down the East Coast each weekend for the remainder of the series each year stopping in places like St. Petersburg, Fl, Daytona, Fl, Charleston, SC, and Wilmington, NC.

 

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the event and we were expecting a larger than normal fleet of boats.  We were not disappointed.  A typical year will see thirty to thirty-five boats entered.  This year fifty-two boats crossed the starting line and our facilities were pushed to the max.  We handled it in stride, though, and the event went off flawlessly.  We were also blessed with some of the best sailing weather this event has ever seen.  Here is what the parking lot looked like as I arrived at work on Saturday morning.

 

 

Here is another shot taken from the docks looking back up at the staging area and flag pole.

 

 

By the way, if you go to the Lightning 19 Racing Association web site, you may see some of the same pictures on there.  The director of the association saw a CD of all of my pictures lying on a desk in the office and took it without asking.  I had transferred my pictures to a CD as a favor for the racing committee so that they could play them back on a big screen like a slide show during the cocktail party in the evening after the races.  The next day I was told no one could locate the CD I had left and I had to make another copy for them.  We later found out that the president of the racing association had seen it in the office and took it for the purpose of using the pictures on their web site. He commented that he had wondered why no pictures had been shown the evening before.   Grrrr…….

 

There is always a good hearted rivalry at the marina between the maintenance department and the docks department. Each year the maintenance personnel chip in along with our director of security to man one of the sailboat hoists at the marina.  We have two hoists, one is a one-ton hoist out on the end of a pier, and the other is a two-ton hoist at the edge of the sea-wall.  The maintenance folks do a great job each year and enjoy doing it.  Here is a picture of them in action.  Now, remember, this is the smaller hoist.

 

 

Notice how many maintenance people are required to man this station.

 

 

My crew is tied up at our power boat hoist and the fuel docks.  Look who mans the huge two-ton hoist each year by himself.

 

 

 

Yes, that is yours truly in much need of a diet running that giant hoist all by himself.  He, he, he…  I think I just got the last word in on that rivalry thing, LOL!

 

I put together this collage showing some of the teams prepping their boats.

 

 

 

I took way too many pictures to show here, but I want you to get a feel for the event.  After we launched all the boats, I hopped on a power boat and went out to join up with the fleet during the racing to get more shots.  I’m just going to end this entry by posting several of the shots I’ve chosen to share with you.  I hope you enjoy these.  I’ll be back soon to tell you all about the dredging project at the marina. In the meantime, take care!