.....Bailed from my phony-baloney administrators job about an hour early yesterday to go over to ‘Div to start to get her dressed up for the Christmas parade. First I stripped off the main and mizzen sail, then attached the wreath to the bow pulpit. Next step, troubleshoot last years lights which took some time. All the while I was being entertained by Dock Boy.

Dock Boy has decided to enter the boat parade.

He’s going to enter his 8’ Avon dink, says he’s going to light it up with a bunch of D cell lights or maybe he’d deck it out with several strings of porch lights, then put together three or four 100’ extension cords and putt out to the judging area with his little trolling motor in a Santa suit with some reindeer that he’d make out of some of those kids Mylar balloons. I said it sounded like a good idea.

 Especially the extension cord part.

Dock Boy appears quite obsessed with the prizes involved with the event, especially the gift certificates to local restaurants. He seems to be hypnotized by this fact, the allure of it. He must be out of charcoal.

He did however, have his ever present tall boy in hand.

So after I got the lights tested out, we hoisted eight strings up to the top of the mainmast with the halyard, carefully sorting them out and securing them to the boom in a kind of Christmas light-faux sail configuration. And we have more plans for the rest of Olivia too. More colored lights, Icicle lights, rope lights,  snowflakes, candy-canes, all kinds of garish garnish.

Dock boy found it necessary to watch us the whole time we worked at the process, often interjecting strange and oblique commentary, much of it centered on the Great Blue Heron that’s become a fixture on his dock since he began feeding it a while back. He seems fascinated by the fact that these birds have been known to inflict great bodily damage and even death with their long spear like beaks when threatened or cornered. He said he never knew they were murderers. I patiently tried to ‘splain to him a bit of wild animal behavior responses, but it was like water off a ducks back.

“I called animal control, ‘cause the thing has been stalking me, but they said they sure as hell weren’t coming over ‘cause the things are murderers….”

“Hey, I guess I’ll see you across the table at the awards celebration.”

Oh my.

Dock boy gravitated between his incessant chatter along the dock next to Olivia then up and down the dock like some sort of mutant marauding wading bird. At one point I saw him shoving the bow of the 28 Bristol moored next to him violently up and down.

I was wondering what inspired this behavior until he walked back over and informed us that the bow gets hung up on the dock. Now I was really  puzzled because the tide was pretty high. In fact it was so high that I had to be careful stepping down off of 'Divs deck to the pier......

Maybe he was taking care of the problem in advance.

I’m planning on having a flare up of Osgood-Schlatters disease, or maybe Tourettes syndrome and leaving sick at around noon today to take care of more of the decorating process.

At the same time I think I'm going to dive the prop and hull, just clean things up so that we’ll be lookin’ pretty on Saturday….besides, it’s just time to do it before the water gets any colder, it’s around 67º F right now, and I hate to wear wetsuits.

I've had my share of wetsuits and drysuits in a previous cats life. Years ago I’d dive to make a few extra bucks. You've already heard my rant about the O' Crafts scam in Kodiak, but I actually would do legitimate work as well.  Like the time I dove on the Cape Fairwell, replacing 27 zincs that they had forgotten to attach while it was up on the tidal grid. Their crew were lovable and scatterbrained. The skipper referred to the boat as the Cape Welfare, and he showed me the stern rail which had been repaired with about a thousand pounds of bondo, having been severely dinged when they plowed into the dock at Akutan.

The Cape Fairwell eventually became another horrifying statistic, a victim of the relentlessly brutal North Pacific, lost at sea off of the Coast of Alaska some years ago.

I would get my SCUBA air from a guy named Mariam Parker, who was a local working diver and all around nice guy. He was married to a cousin of a friend of mine, Marina Katelnikoff.

Unfortunately Mariam was pulled through the prop of the Mariner when the skipper, another friend of mine, Michael Mann came back to the dock, and not knowing Mariam was down working on the prop (tragically, he had not placarded the start/throttle quadrant), turned on the engine and put the boat in gear to test it out.

It broke every bone in Mariams body, and he died in the helo in route to Anchorage.

There will be none of that business aboard Olivia. I’ll have the key in my pocket.

And Dock Boy will be on watch on the dock. I’m sure he’ll be staying away from the Great Blue Heron though.