This is a blurb I wrote a few months ago and had saved as a draft. I forgot that I hadn’t published it. So a bit late but here it is.
The reason we went up to the boat for the last few days was to clean her up a bit and get the bilge pump working again. A few months ago the bilge pump had come on continuously and for some reason couldn’t be turned off. I’m not sure that Angela even knew it was the bilge pump as it is a really nice diaphragm unit that sits up in the back of the engine compartment and doesn’t really look like a what you would think a standard bilge pump would. It ran for a day or two before she found out where the noise was coming from. It’s pretty quiet when running dry. Finally she just cut the power line to it to get it to turn off. I think what happened is that the automatic switch went bad or the control panel for it went bad and left it running.
Another project that needed immediate attention was the port hawse pipe on Valkyr. I was walking up to her on the dock and just happened to notice that the hawse pipe was about to fall off. So I pulled it all the way off. I thought some of the rest of you would be interested in how the sides of the boat here are designed. It is hollow up in there.
You know all the shit that accumulates in the corners of a boat? This story isn’t about that kind of shit. This story is about the kind that leaks through the ruptured diaphragm in a pump on a hose that terminates in a holding tank.
If that opening doesn’t grab attention, I’m not sure what will. Let me backtrack just a bit.
We actually spent three days working on the boat this week. The teak on deck is now at about 90% and in some area’s even has three coats of Tequa. We are really liking the Tequa, it goes on thin and penetrates on try teak for the first couple of coats and on the third coat gives the teak a soft luster that is just beautiful. So far we have used about one and a quarter quarts and it has covered 90% of the boat in two coats and some parts of the boat in three coats. I think we will stop at three coats and then see what durability is over time. Pictures of all this will be forthcoming in the next week or so.
I started this little mini rant in answer to a post by a friend about how he had seen the Coast Guard seriously damage or sink US registered boats in the USVI and Puerto Rico in search of drugs etc on the boats of innocent people that had nothing to do with drugs or anything illegal.
This happens but most of the time you are not going to get hammered like this by the coast guard.. it’s not so endemic that it happens all the time. Unfortunately the coast guard is made up of human beings and they are given missions that require a lot of judgment to carry out appropriately. As Ben said you get some young 18 to 24 year olds sometimes that their enthusiasm overrides their common sense. In their defense though… up till the current wars around the world the coast guard saw more action than any other military branch in the US and still do see a lot of action. We don’t hear about it a lot but they are never sure when they pull up to someone on the water if they are going to end up in a shoot out with drug runners out of south America etc… I think that with some of them it leaves them more viewing everyone as a potential danger to themselves when they pull them over than as a routine check etc… It lends itself to overreaction on the side of the Coast Guard in some situations. To be honest we see this in most of our myriad law enforcement agency’s. I would recommend that anyone that this happens to do their best to obtain legal representation and pursue it. It needs to be addressed so that it happens less in the future.
There are 5 segments to this. I have posted all the segments in this post. If your on my home page then it will only show the first one. You have to go to the post page by clicking on the heading to see all 5.
I found this to be a an interesting speech on the little understood and little known history of the constitution and how our federal government became what it now is. I’m sure that this is just skimming the surface of the subject but I enjoyed it.
I had someone send me an email of one of these speeches and found them very interesting. So I tracked down a bunch of them to listen to. Here are few that gave me a lot to think about.
I just watched these two very sobering videos by a lawyer and a cop about why we should take our 5th amendment rights very seriously in dealing with the police. Have fun watching them.
This joke has been around for a long time. I got it in email again yesterday and realized that I got a kick out of it every time I had read it. So it makes the joke hall of fame and gets posted here.
🙂
The IRS decides to audit Grandpa, and summons him to the IRS office..
The IRS auditor was not surprised when Grandpa showed up with his attorney.
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