CL II: Water-Displacement Forty

Cottage Life, unless yours is a mansion with full-time staff, is mostly maintenance, with a few intervening breaks for nature or beer. I’m neither deft nor mechanically gifted, but the right industrial chemicals can make up for that.

I include the view shot to illustrate the story, but you have to enlarge it first, and when you do there are other points of interest. The pale-brown line on the water, more or less in the middle of the picture, is a log boom; trees that have been cut somewhere near the ocean and are being hauled off to the mill by a tugboat, which you can actually see towards the left side of the picture, a black-and-white dot on the water among the pine needles.

You can also see our dock partly behind the bushes at the bottom. We get 15 feet or more of tide, so there’s a high walkway on pilings, a floating platform, and a connecting ramp, hinged at the top, rolling at the bottom. The dock bobs in the waves and the ramp squeaks irritatingly.

I asked around and wondered what to do and the guy two lots over said “That bastard’s bin’ squealin’ like a stuck pig for years”. Well, apparently they’d never heard of WD-40. Now, I had to dangle a dozen feet over the rocks to get at the top end of the ramp, and lie on my belly in among the wood-chips and bird crud for the bottom, but it doesn’t squeak any more, just the silence and the waves now. Aaaaah. It is has been suggested that I used more WD-40 than strictly necessary.

WD-40 · It has a Web Site (Flashturbation, sigh) where there’s an Official Fan Club, and of course a Wikipedia entry, and a handy page at Snopes about WD-40 legend: “Lubricates prosthetic limbs”. I love WD-40.

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