absurd day
It started out as a cool windy grey day, but as it's summer, it's not actually cold. So we took a walk around part of the lake and back. Another dog pack started out in the opposite direction and actually made it all the way round. I ran into them passing my bus, commented "cute" at the dogs and then "Did you actually go all the way around the lake?" "Yes" was the reply but uttered with such ice and fury as to leave me breathless with wonder. How one can put so much negativity into one positive syllable is astonishing. Absurd.
Then I did my laundry in the ridiculous little laundry bucket spinny thing. It does very little at a time but it does speed up the job vs doing it entirely by hand. I plugged it in at the tournament house at the ski club beach where I'm boondocking. Kind of stealing power, really, but not a lot. Mostly I run on my solar.
I was using lake water for the laundry and then the ski club boat headed out to tow a member and the wake muddied the water. Whoops! I had to finish my job with drinking water from the big tank under the bus, something I wanted to avoid. Filling my bathtub might be asking too much? I dunno, he spends long hours not out on the lake and that was the day's only client. Go figger.
Well I got on with my day and while Dan was over visiting the dogs, the guy who runs the boat, young fellow barely out of puberty, hollers at me from the lake on a drifting boat. I came out to see, and he needed me to tow him with my kayak back to the boat house.
Ha! I jumped for it, what a hilarious idea, and my experience with boats says it's possible. Slow, but doable. Good exercise for me too. I was laughing and paddling and just delighted at the self image of this little kayak towing a speedboat. To be fair, it's not a large boat nor has it much draft. It's small and nimble. It definitely preferred to tow sideways which was annoying. Ohhhh, I know why. He was steering, with the engine. Which was not acting as an engine, but a rudder, which steers in the opposite direction. So he was acting at cross purposes and neither of us caught it. Well no matter, I got that darn boat in up to the boathouse dolly and he was able to winch it on up into the boathouse and sort out the engine for tomorrow.
Dan watched, so gobsmacked that he didn't even get a photo of it. Pity. I would have loved to put that on social media. Well, I can talk about it here, nobody to say they don't believe me and ruin the fun of it. oh, and I am now able to get in and out without getting wet shoes if the beach is flat enough. Rocks, maybe not? But yeah, didn't get my shoes wet. You know, if i hadn't recently installed a steel locking cable on a solid bolt with washers at a reinforced tether point I found on the stern, and tried to tie up to that speedboat in any other way, I think it would have failed. The ropes are old, they'd never have tolerated all that tugging. Hmmmm, I could tow driftwood to shore at the coast and get free wood. Interesting. Not sure how that works these days or if there's a point yet. But knowin a kayak can do that is tremendous. It did have a problem with tension, a stretchy section on the tow rope might really make the job better. It slacked and jerked with each paddle of the oars. Well anyway, it was a lovely way to cap off the night. and I should call it for the night now.