Dock Pictures

Here is what the marina looked like last night.

And here it is this morning.  Rick and crew worked on it until 3:30 am.

Julie’s Birthday

Yesterday, another hot, sunny day, was Julie’s birthday.  To celebrate, Rick took her and their daughter Ari into town for dinner.  They closed the store up an hour early, at 6 pm.  We told them to enjoy their evening off; Julie works the store from 7 am to 7 pm, seven days a week, and Rick does the maintenance often putting in 16 hour days.

Richard and I and Jordan, one of the hired teenagers, sat at the gate in the stifling heat, saying that Rick and Julie really ought to take the night off more often.  And saying that a breeze would be nice; it was overcast, but still well up in the nineties.

Then thunder started rumbling, and a couple of sprinkles fell, and a breeze kicked up.   The breeze picked up dust and blew it everywhere, into our faces and our sodas.  The breeze turned into a fierce wind.  The dust thickened so we could hardly see.  People were scrambling to hold their tents and gazebos up.  I went to take down my internet dish and I heard a loud clunking and banging.  It was the dock breaking loose!!

At first it was hard to see it through all the dust, but it was a real mess.   The wind had blown the whole marina south several yards.  One wing of the dock had separated from the main dock, and the main dock was broken!  The ramp down to the dock was actually flipped onto its side!  Three people had just docked their boat and were walking up the ramp mere moments before it flipped.  In the campground, a large limb broke off one of the juniper trees.  Luckily, no one and no tents or RVs were under it when it fell.  Sheesh!! We were left in charge and things had gone to hell in less than an hour.

Meanwhile, the Deputy Sheriffs were out on the lake.  They were at the far end of the reservoir and were flagged down by a boat that had mechanical problems and needed to be towed in.  So there they were, fighting 3 to 4 foot swells and white caps, towing another boat across the lake (into the wind,  of course) to  the boat ramp at Powder Cove.  Even though the Sheriff’s boat has a canopy, they got drenched.  And the people in the boat being rescued didn’t have a canopy.  After getting the boaters safely ashore, the deputies headed back to the marina.  When they approached, they looked at the docks and said to each other, “That’s not right!”  They tied up to the dock, but there was no way they could put their boat in its slip.

It took us quite a while to reach Rick and Julie because they didn’t have their cell phones with them.  We tried a couple of local restaurants we thought they had gone to, to no avail.  I finally got in touch with Debbie, who is the cafe cook on weekends.  She was working at the bowling alley, which Rick’s brother-in-law runs.  They tracked down Rick and Julie  — they had just finished their salad and the main course was being brought out to them.  They had it put in go-boxes and high-tailed it back up here.  Rick’s dad and uncle came too, to help put the docks back together.

Lots of people, including the Sheriffs,  pulled their boats out of the marina, some onto their trailers, others anchored in front of the campground.

Rick, his dad, uncle, Ari, Jordan, one of the Deputies and several others worked on the docks for hours getting everything sorted out.

In the campground, Richard took a chainsaw to the downed tree limb and it got loaded into the back of pickup truck and hauled up the hill to the burn pile.

This morning, the lake is mirror calm.