Pushing a rock

There are many big rocks along our shoreline.

This is a good thing! If they weren't there, the barrage of waves would erode our side of the island until the Hodge Podge Lodge tipped over and fell into the drink.

There's one big rock that's in the way, though. Handy Dad thought it would be a good idea to be able to winch the Pedal Boat up the slope at the shore to get it out of the way, but the rock was smack in the middle of its path.

Handy Dad and the captain set about moving the big rock. It was easily 32°C, which makes me a little suspicious of their motives behind spending the afternoon in the lake "moving a rock". But, they moved it! They shifted it out from shore and away from the dock about 3 feet in both directions.

I think they weren't best pleased with me when I pointed out that it was now preventing the pedal boat from travelling from the dock around Dad's boat.

So they moved the rock again.

At some point, the captain must have had his finger caught under the rock, because the next day, he happened to glance at his wedding ring (no doubt thinking what an excellent choice he'd made in a wife...) and it was mashed flat around his finger! I don't know how it took him that long to figure it out, but he had to use a pair of pliers to squeeze it back open enough to get it off of his finger.

It now looks like this (imagine the right side of the ring was as flat as the left, and you get an idea how squashed it was).

I had more photos of the rock moving, the ring pre-extrication, and also their efforts to level out our badly sloping lower deck (which also required them spending quite a bit of time in the water. Coincidence? I think not.), but they were swallowed up by the SD Card Failure of 2012.

2012-07-11, UPDATE: Photos recovered!!

 
Here's the captain discovering the squashed ring on his finger. It took him a day before he even noticed it was like that. I'm surprised it wasn't cutting off the circulation in his finger!

It was really, really squashed!

He wrapped it in a rubberband (so it wouldn't get badly scratched)

and pinched it with pliers to reshape it enough to get it off of his hand.

I helped by taking pictures. (-;

And here are the boys hard at work (in the water) trying to level out the lower deck.

It's still sloping, but nowhere near as badly as it was originally.

That little jack of Dad's is handy!