Taking the dock out - ballooning over the stream

The season-end ritual of taking the dock out of the water is always daunting. Whether you are taking a multi-stage fixed dock out of the water in sections, or horsing a floating dock up onto the beach, it's a big job. Some years we've had a team of friends to help, temperatures in the 40's, everyone inside directly afterward for hot coffee. Some years it's been just us two, trying not to put our backs out, not exactly enjoying the process.

This year, however it went much more smoothly. We finally realized that we've been making it much harder on ourselves by putting the 'connector section' on top of the floating part before winching it up tight on the beach near the rocks. The connector section weighs over a hundred pounds! So this time we did it without the connector weighing down the floating dock. Piece of cake. Where in past years we struggled for an hour, inching the dock up with the come-along and rusty chain round the big pine, this year we pulled the dock up tight in about fifteen minutes  Done. Here is a photo of the dock all put away for winter.

It was a beautiful day - sunny and in the 70's with a very light breeze. As I was putting waders on at the dock, I noticed spider webs flying up into the air, seemingly out of nowhere. Then I traced one of the strands to the top of the dock post, where a medium-sized spider was standing - a long strand flying above him in the light breeze. Suddenly he jumped up, and the wind carried him right out over the stream, as he held onto his long web/balloon. I hope he knew where he was going because it's about 300 feet to the opposite shore. I've read about this, but have never seen a spider 'ballooning' before. Just like the end of CHARLOTTE'S WEB.

Here we huge mammals were struggling over moving a dock a few feet, and this little creature fashioned himself a balloon and flew away.

Follow this link to a great blog entry about a family in Minnesota who hired the local highschool football team to take their dock out!  The link is here