My friend and his ship remain at the secluded bay up the coast.  He’s not done there yet.  Murphy got involved.

Firstly, ‘friend’ has three boats.  There is the big Mama and then there is the little baby boat (LB).  In between is the mid-sized Big-Boy boat (BB).  The two smaller ones are ship’s tenders.  You need small boats with which to do things that are too difficult with huge, old tanker-ships.

As you have gleaned from the previous post, ‘friend’ works around the tides.  When the tide gets close to being low enough, friend goes to work on Big Mama and, naturally, his focus is on the work-at-hand and not on the two other boats.

Murphy, however, attended to them.

As the tide dropped BB got hung up on some rocks, tipped on it’s side and filled with water as it sank.  It did not go too deep.  The bottom is shallow, after all.  Still, it filled with water and sank in the deathly shallows.  While friend cleaned and scraped big Mama, BB sank deeper and disgorged the usual workboat flotsam and jetsam into the area.  NOT pollution per se (he is a Greenie) but definitely unsightly and messy.  Maybe a few wine bottles, ya know?

When he discovered his new gift from Murph, he waded over to the mess and started to ‘sort’ it all out beginning with the wooden pallets he had obtained earlier and stored inside BB.  He carried all of them through the water and stacked those pallets on Big Mama.  Of course, as he was dragging the last pallet onto Big Mama’s deck, the stack of pallets he had just put there, fell over and the free-falling pallets fell on his ankle and leg.  Nothing broke except the silence of the bay as friend bellowed out to Murph!

But my big toe feels his ankle pain.

The next day it poured and poured and his leg was kinda mushed so not a lot got done.  Still, he is not the type to just sit it out and so he went back to BB to try and right it.  In the process, the boat, half submerged, moved unexpectedly and pinned his arm and wrist between a rock and a boat-place.  The wing got squished.  Friend bellowed again.

He limped his sorry butt back to the Big Mama and poured wine with his remaining good arm.  He hurt from fingers to toes.  BB still lay on it’s side under water.  Friend’s mood was somewhat dampened by events and he couldn’t wait for Murphy to leave.

But, the next day is another day.  And it was not raining.  So, it was potentially a good day.  He limped through the remaining clean up and will eventually get to addressing how to ‘right’ BB.  That task wouldn’t be easy if he had a crew of three and everyone was a young buck.  Assisted only by the omnipresent-but-never-welcome Murphy, friend has his work cut out but, knowing him, he’ll succeed.

Or, he will hurt something else, drink more wine and keep doing it all over and over again until it is done.

I mentioned that he was a smidge obstinate, didn’t I?