Noah's Report

Would anyone know the number of a good canoe builder? I might have to load Steph, the boys and our dogs, 2 by 2, on to the thing if we get any more rain.

Since Friday night there are reports of up to a foot of rain in some places along the James River Valley in South Dakota.

We got about 7" on Friday night at Lake Byron. People all over the area are cleaning basements out, and buying every Shop-Vac in a 8 county region.

The lake, which is up 2.5 feet since we moved in back in August, came up another foot early Saturday morning...along with a day of 30 mph winds our permanent dock got a great wash off, and we were pretty happy with how things were going.

Then Sunday morning, when we woke up we heard this constant, bong, bong, bong, bong...so I walked out on the deck and looked down at the water, and behold, we inherited a pontoon boat. The bad news was that the waves were throwing the boat on top of our dock and breaking it apart. (the pictures above shows the damage, and our neighbor and his kid looking at the "wacked up boards" as his son Cody put it) In 10 minutes 3 neighbors had identified the pontoon as a neighbors from the south side of the lake.

We jumped in, found the keys in the glove box (only in South Dakota) and waited for some waves and a couple of pushes off the dock and our piers by the deckhands, and the boat was freed.

So me and the neighbor went for a 7Am pontoon ride on Sunday morning, to help the lost boat find it's way home. The owner met us at his house, and we ended up loading the pontoon and his boat on the trailers. He said, "enjoy your new dock that my insurance company will put in for you." Ahh, insurance companies, I love working with them, or getting worked by them.

Sunday night we took a tour of the area to see the water levels...here are some pictures.

This is the boat launch on the south side...if you click on the picture you will be able to see the mooring posts that hold the dock in place...right now the dock is about 2 foot under water.

This is the Dave Gross' farm. The house was dry, but the feedlot looked more like a swimming pool. Dave also has a place on the lake, and his dock suffered a little damage as well.

This was the scene in the back of the Expedition during the tour of the country side...Maxim was completely excited about driving around looking at the water, as you can tell. Brecken, as usual, just happy to be along.

This is "Hog's Back" on the east side of the lake, if you are familiar with the lake, you probably don't recognize it at all...funny how some water changes the look of the land.

Over all we were pretty fortunate, no tornadoes, no flooding, yet. Just some busted up dock and a bunch of drifting garbage that found it's way to our dock and boat lift. Oh yeah...if you look closely at the picture of our dock you can see a 40 foot utility pole...that will be brought up to the front parking area of our house and will serve as our "parking bumper". So I guess we did get some good things out of the storm. Maxim was also excited about the dead bullhead that washed up on our dock. Living on Liquid is soooooo exciting.

And just think about a week ago I was running out of things to blog about, and was thinking about shutting down the blog for a while, or forever...like anyone beside Skipper, Verlie and Grandpa Roger would know. Last thing, becuase of the rain, Steph's dishwasher is hooked up and running, and the fridge is plugged into it's own outlet, not by an extension cord running to the bathroom.

Progress, little by little.