Chillin at Lake Corpus Christi 15 Jul, 2005
The following events are based on a true story.
We’ve got three boats up at the lake right now:
- A ski boat, which seats eight
- An aluminum one with an outboard which seats, um, four if you’re lucky
- A sailboat which seats, um, one
Wednesday
We were going to take the ski boat out Wednesday evening to see how badly we all think we can ski, when water started seeping onto the deck. We took it back to dock and began bailing (because it has no pump), and after checking to see if the plug from the little aluminum boat would fit anywhere (it didn’t), we decided to take the ski boat back to the launch because it was taking on water even with nobody in it.
Lake Corpus Christi is a very shallow lake, and you have to get about 100 feet away from the pier to get out of waist-high water, which we did. Then the motor wouldn’t start! Luckily, we had a cellphone with us, and the cellphone had better reception half a mile out into the lake than it did inside the house on the shore (three bars out of five, rather than ‘one bar if you hold your tongue right’). Calling back to shore, and requesting the aluminum boat to come out for a tow, it was pointed out that someone (ahem, Ted) left the plug in the other boat, which was now in the middle of the lake.
I got to swim an estimated 3/4 of a mile back to shore to ferry a tiny stopper, which took the better part of an hour, then we got towed behind the little aluminum one at an estimated 14,400 feet per hour (doing math in one’s head is fun to drone out the motor noise).
Thursday
Replaced a number of posts that hold up the pier, because they were hollow and nails weren’t holding in them anymore. Trapped in by cross-bracing that’s a maze to get out of, my younger brother Ted smacked one of them with a sledgehammer to knock it out of the way, and a snake was flung at me. Ugh. I like snakes if I can see them before they go underwater. Once I can’t see the snake, then it’s won. Eric and I (the ‘college student club’) developed a lever system to raise and hold the pier so we could use a fifty pound pile driver plus operators while remaining height-adjustable. We should have taken pictures, but we just wanted to get done and get out of the lakewater.
I think it’d be fun to see what Corpus Christi does to filter the water to make it “drinkable” (sort of) — this lake is their water source and it’s very “yuck.”
Note to self, lenses fog up a lot when the temperature differential is thirty degrees and the humidity is like 90% outdoors.
Thursday (continued)
This is sad. GPRS service through my phone at 5.x KiB/s is twice as fast as landline modems here. We managed to download 37MiB worth of distfiles using the http-replicator proxy on my Mac, which works great. Sharing the internet from my bluetooth-enabled phone doesn't work at all, for some reason. I think it's a timeout issue... but proxying works perfectly and gets full speed, just so long as there are no dns queries, heh.