03 January 2014

• #2: Islamorada Journal 2014…02 JAN [The return of Shoo-Fly]


Don't have a clue as to what sort of plant this is. Neat flowers, though.

Wayne and Linda came over to the house this morning to assist with the project of moving Shoo-Fly from the marina where she’s been stored since being trucked down to the Keys from the frigid north.

This is most-easily done with three persons as one drives us 5 miles or so down US-1 to the marina and then takes the vehicle back to the house [Linda was driver today]. Then the other two, Wayne and I, crank up the boat and head back to the house via Florida Bay. Don’t really need two people to make the run as I know the waters well-enough to do the run solo. The second person comes in handy, however—as all you who’ve fished with us down here know—when it’s time to get the boat into the protective basin in front of the house.

As you can see in the image, the entrance to the “G”-shaped basin is pretty tight, and getting a 22’ long, 8’ wide boat into it requires an approach parallel to the top of the G and then a tight, 180° left-hand turn between the basin walls which are constructed from coral.

One does not want the boat to contact this stuff.

So I steer the boat and Wayne stands by with the boat pole ready to ward off disaster. Sometimes I snake the boat through without him [or whomever else is fishing with me that day] having to do anything; other times…esp when the wind is up and slamming waves into the basin walls…. Well, let’s just say so far we’ve been lucky…or highly skillful…or some proportioning of both.

BTW, the image of the basin was made by Google Earth on 06 March 2013, during the time we were here, so that's actually Shoo-Fly sitting in the basin.

As an aside, as we were leaving the marina, Wayne spotted this lady sunning on the deck of a dockside boat…he elbowed me in the side…I grabbed the camera and grabbed a shot.

Wayne said, “you’ll never get anything in that photo except a bunch of handrails and other hardware” [or words to that effect]…but having again been lucky…or highly skillful…or some proportioning of both...it came out pretty well.

Back to our story. We got the boat into the basin and spent 20 minutes trying to remember how to tie the boat up. Why so much fiddling around? The portion of the dock against which the boat rests comprises three vertical, unpadded hard posts and no flat, dock-like structure…plus there’s the effect of the tide which lifts and lowers the boat relative to the posts as the posts are fixed and do not rise and fall with the tide.

Well, we figgered it out, and later on I checked what we had done against a photo I’d taken last year, and we got the arrangement exactly the same…so Shoo-Fly’s all set and safe. The basin may be a pest to get into, but once we’re in there and secured to the dock, the basin surely protects the boat from wind and wave.

So we unloaded a bunch of stuff from the boat and opened the hatches to the sun and wind…probably killing off a couple of million mold spores in the process. Tomorrow it’s supposed blow up ["North winds 20 to 25 knots and gusty. Bay waters very rough. Isolated showers."] so will use the time to clean up Shoo-Fly and get tackle ready. Imagine, here 24 hours and haven’t put a fishing rod together yet!

Stand by.

More to come.

• Meanwhile, in other news...

• Vacuum Pressure May Someday Pull Salmon Over Dams


“The vacuum system being tested at the Roza Dam has the potential to move fish significant distances, and some believe the technology could be used to move live fish even over some of the region’s largest dams that lack fish passage, such as Grand Coulee.”

Read the full article at this link: SeattleTimes.com

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