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Posted on: Friday March 2, 2018 at: 7:00 pm
A week and a half ago Helen and I were discussing how it looked as though Spring was coming early. Ducks and birds were getting frisky and we were seeing the first flowers blooming. How wrong that was.
It was rather windy as well as snowy last night and the marina we are temporarily moored in was rather choppy. Surprisingly it has not yet frozen over, probably because of the waves. Look carefully at this photo:
Ice petals
Where the branches meet the water, “ice petals” have formed. We think this is caused by the same waves. The top of the wave wets the branch and the damp area freezes. When the next wave comes along, it adds to it, then freezes and so on until a complete petal forms. The same thing happens to the hull of the boats that don’t have any heating and to the supports for the pontoons we are moored to.
The strong winds last night also had us bouncing around rather a lot. Actually very relaxing when you are going to sleep, but it also caused us to spend around half an hour searching for an annoying bump sound that kept repeating. We searched everywhere for what was banging against the hull. We eliminated all the fenders, the ropes and the mooring itself. In the end, this is what it turned out to be:
Water barrel
This is our emergency water barrel, in case we are frozen in and run out of water in our main tank. Notice it is leaning to one side, because it is actually frozen solid and the barrel has swollen. This is the base:
Swollen barrel
As the boat rocked in the wind, it was thumping the side of the bow.
In fact the rocking of the boat is very helpful since it keeps the water in the main tank moving. That in turn helps prevent the water from freezing.
joy
TRUELY AMAZING….GOOD ENOUGH FOR A NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE,,,