We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat . . .

With no trip down to Webster today, it was another day to take it easy and goof off. Pretty much too hot to do anything outside, although it was actually a little cooler today. Only 98, rather than yesterday’s 101. Every little bit helps, I guess.

A little before 5pm we lost shore power. When it didn’t come back on in a few minutes, I went out and checked the power pedestal. I took my 3 light tester with me and plugged it into the 20amp socket.

No power. And cycling the breaker didn’t help. Nor did resetting the GFI button

While I’m standing there thinking, I hear something familiar. The outside AC unit is running at the bath house on the other side of the rig. So the power’s not out at the park

Going back to the pedestal, I took another look at the breakers. I had kind of concentrated on the 20amp power and hadn’t cycled the 50amp breaker. It looked OK but when I touched it to flip it, it dropped into the middle position showing it had really blown. So I cycled it and the power came back on.

So I had been misled by a faulty 20 breaker or socket. But the other thing I noticed was that the 50 amp breaker was almost too hot to touch, an indication that either the breaker has a problem, or the connections inside are bad. I’ll have to keep an eye on it.

Since I’m from Alabama, and we were recently there for a couple of weeks, I was interested to see this story about this record-sized alligator caught near Camden, AL 

One thing that surprised me is that Camden, although near the Alabama River, is about 100 miles from the coast, and even further in ‘river’ miles. That’s a long way for a gator to swim, especially one this big

Alabama Gator 1

This big boy measured out at 15 feet long, and when they tried to weigh it, it broke the winch. Finally using a backhoe, they weighed it out at 1,011.5 pounds.

Alabama Gator 2

And it looks very possible that  this might be a new world record. A couple of months ago, the Safari Club International declared a 14 foot 8 inch gator caught in 2007 and weighing 880 pounds as a new world record. Sounds like this one has it beat.

 Alabama Gator 3

The other thing surprising about this is that the boat that they used to capture this gator was only 17 feet long. According to the article, they several times found  themselves being dragged around, towed up and down the river by the gator.

To paraphrase ‘Jaws’, “I’d want a bigger boat.”

Tomorrow Jan and I have our trip down to Webster for Jan’s breast cancer check up.
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Thought for the Day:

If you can’t fix it with a hammer, you’ve got an electrical problem.

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