Slips Available – At Your Own Risk!
Published: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 4:00 pm
By: Sam, Lefty and Wade - Proprietors
Well, it’s been a slow week here in Purgatory Cove. We got a new boat here at the Cove this week. Sam had made arrangements with the owner but forgot to tell Lefty and Wade. Lefty was walkin’ the docks, checkin’ the yellow plastic dock lines. Sam got a great deal on a couple of reels of yellow dock line down at the grocery and unclaimed freight store. It’s mostly okay, but we have to check after every breeze as it tends to break now and then.
It gets interesting if it turns into a real blow. You’ll hear the yellow lines start to snap, sounds like a rifle shot. Sam will send Lefty and Wade out to check the lines and replace them before the boats get banged up too much. In a real blow, Lefty and Wade will be down on their knees crawlin’ the docks as they get to movin’ up and down pretty fierce.
Anyway, Lefty comes upon this new boat at the dock. Several things tipped him off that it was a new boat in the Cove. It was clean, for a start. The Cove is downwind of the fertilizer plant. More importantly, it is downwind of the fertilizer plant’s smokestack. They burn a lot of stuff in their boilers and not much of it is what you’d call “clean.” The boats here in the Cove all have a film of ash and soot that stays until the next big rain.
The other tip off was the dock lines. They were these fancy gold colored lines with white flecks in them. The kind you find up at the fancy boat store with fancy prices to match. Most of the folks here at the Cove are happy with the stuff Sam has. It’s cheap, even if it needs replaced often. Not only were the dock lines fancy, they were all coiled up nice and neat. It was easy to see that none of the fishermen stumbling down the dock at O-dark thirty had tripped over them.
Another thing yelling “new boat here” were the fancy white bumper things between the boat and the dock. Seems like the owner had taken the trouble to take off the perfectly good tires hanging from the edge of the dock and replace them with these fancy white bumper things. It was plain to see that this owner had no experience with what the fertilizer plant dumped in the water. Not to mention the old leaky oil barrel on the shore – the one where boaters, mostly, dumped their old oil when they changed it.
Lefty was mentioning all this to Sam and Wade back in the boat shed. Sam allowed it all because the new guy was the new manager at the fertilizer plant. It will be interesting to see if that changes anything here at the Cove.
Other than that, it’s been a slow week here in Purgatory Cove.
