The
Squamidian Report – Aug. 13 / 11
http://www.thedougsite.net/Squamidian/2011/aug13.htm
Issue #481
Including:
The Ontarion
Hi All,
‘They’ have had to close the local hiking trails around here. Not because of all the bears wandering around, heck, we have then sauntering down the middle of our street in the middle of the day. Its because of the cougars that have been stalking and confronting people out in the bush. The trails are very popular with dog walkers and mountain bicyclers. The cougars seem to be loosing their fear of people. It is normally quite rare to even see one of these big cats (yes, I’m talking about the cat kind of cougar, not the kind of cougar that hangs out in the trendy bars and other popular social places around here). Of late, the cats have become quite menacing to the point where they no longer back down and its only a matter of time before someone gets eaten. So, until the wildlife people can catch and deal with the cats, the trails are closed. No one know why the cats are becoming aggressive, there is lots of natural prey for them. Anyway, if your are around here and want to go out for a walk, best to stay on the sidewalks. Who knows what’s behind the next tree.
Speaking of wild life, we (‘The Wife’ and I) took part in a multi-chapter over night ride last weekend. Several members from our Vancouver CMC chapter and I met a bunch of Island chapter members as they came off the ferry at Horseshoe Bay on Saturday morning, and escorted them up to our place for a BBQ. We then headed north, up through Whistler and Pemberton, over the Duffy to Lillooet and on to Cache Creek where we all stayed at a motel. My friend from the Kootenay’s joined us there as well. Sunday morning we all saddled up and headed back. It made for a great weekend of riding through some of the most spectacular scenery anywhere.
As mentioned, part of the ride took us over the Duffy. When you leave the Pemberton Valley and start to climb, you climb continually for 13km that include some very steep sections and some incredibly tight switch-backs. The predominant odor is not the fresh mountain air, but the smell of cooking brakes from the cars, trucks, motor homes etc coming down that didn’t heed the warnings about slowing down and gearing down before starting down. There are some pretty rattled drives at the bottom, and many others who haven’t a clue that smoke is pouring out around their wheels and can’t figure out why their vehicle would no longer slow down when the brakes were applied.
Once up past the first section the ride is though alpine mountain scenery, its twisty and tight and its where riders from all over the world come just for the adventure. Traffic was very light (luckily) and whole group was able to ride single file, stretched out for quite a ways. The north end of the Duffy has the same challenges as the south, steep and tight. And, same smell of cooking brakes from vehicles that didn’t slow down ahead of time. The Duffy (a section of Highway 99, and short for ‘Duffy Lake Road’) takes you to Lillooet and that puts you into the Fraser Canyon area. Just as spectacular scenery, but very different. You have passed through the Coastal Range and are now in the dry Interior. The Fraser River is way, way down in the bottom of the very steep canyon and the country side is low dry mountains and rolling cowboy country. The rock formations are no longer granite and basalt, they are now sedimentary, such as shales, limestone and sandstone. The weather was good, and the ride was good. ‘The Wife’ took a lot of pictures while riding on the back of our bike as we rumbled along. I’ve posted some of them to our chapter’s Photobucket site, rather than to my own web site because this was more of a CMC event than one of my own riding adventures. So, if you want to check out the pics, you can go their directly by clicking this link:
Or, you can go to a single page I’ve put up on my site using this link and then follow the link that is there:
http://www.thedougsite.net/11-Rides/CMC/CacheCr.html
doug
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THE ONTARION REPORT
Hello everyone!
With summer about half gone it’s beginning to feel like I have to go back to school in a few weeks! Funny how when you see the school clothes and supplies ads on TV it brings back all those feelings from when you were actually a kid still in your school years! It always made me mad when the summer wasn’t even over yet and they began selling “Back To School” stuff on TV. For some reason I used to think if they’d just lay off that BS on TV, my parents would somehow forget that come September kids had to return to school and we’d get a few extra weeks off while the weather was still nice! LOL! I don’t know why but the summers seemed to just fly by when we were kids and they don’t seem much better now that I’m an old kid either! The only plus I have now is that I’m retired and don’t have to do squat on any particular date if I don’t feel like it! Unless, that is, the wife (as Doug puts it) decides otherwise! Hahahahaa…….! To be truthful it would be an awful boring life if all we had to do was “nothing”! It’s nice to keep busy but it is nice to be able to keep busy when you chose to do so and that’s what retirement is really all about isn’t it! There always seems to be something that needs doing and to have the ability to pick and choose what to do and when to do it is really the ticket!
There are however some projects that crop up and need your attention ASAP. Like for instance, last Friday Carole informed me that the motor on the pond pump was running but there was no water spouting up from the pipe in the middle of the pond! Oh oh, this spelled trouble for sure! It was late afternoon and it took me at least a half hour to trouble shoot the pump problem to determine how to remedy the situation. If there is no water squirting out of the spout then there was no water being circulated through the sand filter and the pond water would soon become dirty! My thoughts of the early days of having the pond and it being filled with brown scummy water from the fish and too small a filter came rushing back into my head! Don’t want that situation happening again! We enjoy the clean clear sparkling water that the modern system provides so I had to get busy and fix the problem. With the motor running and no pressure to move the water, I figured the pump itself was the source of the trouble. After trying to re-prime the pump to no avail I decided I had to pull the pump apart and see what if anything was broken inside. When I got all the hoses disconnected I took the pump and motor down into my workshop and removed the front plate from the pump housing. When I got that off, I found the wheel inside known as the “impeller” was rattling around loose! The shaft pocket on the backside of the impeller had broken clean off and the motor had been running free. The only solution would be to replace the impeller with a new one.
The darned thing is only made out of plastic so it’s no wonder it broke after so many years of continuous duty. I had purchased it used from some guy in New Market and he had had it on his swimming pool for 5 years. I was lucky that it lasted three years more on our pond filter! I checked the internet and found that a new one would be between $300.00 and $500.00 so used would be the way to go once again. The only used one’s on the net for sale were in the $150 to $300 range. I decided to wait until after the weekend and visit Shiels Electric Motor shop that I had dealt with for many years and ask if they could repair the pump for me. Tuesday morning after the long weekend I took the pump and motor to them and talked to Paul at the front counter. He said they could replace the impeller for me but it would take three days to get it back to me at a cost of $175.00. I thought about it for a minute and asked if he would sell me the parts and let me do it myself. Paul was happy to oblige and I headed home to dismantle the pump so I could take the old parts back to him for replacement. I got the old impeller off and out of the housing and removed the remains of the neck of it from the shaft of the motor. I managed to get the seal out from the base of the motor shaft as well and headed back to see Paul. He sold me a new impeller and a new seal for the tidy sum of $55.94, which was a far cry from the cost of a rebuild or a new system! I took it home and cleaned up the old housing and managed to reassemble the new parts in just a half hour. With another half hour of outdoor work to hook up the hoses once more I had the rebuilt pump working like a new one and the pond was splashing once again! Having sat in the sun for the weekend the water had turned a tad murky so I hit it with a good dose of chlorine and some algaecide and just have to wait a day for it to clear up. It always turns a bit cloudy when first treated. I’ll get up early tomorrow and shock the pond with pool shock and it’ll be good as new! This is just one of those times when if it’s not a weekend, you simply have to fix the problem as soon as possible! Luckily I have lots of electric motor experience and was able to do the job myself.
Saved myself a few bucks to boot too!
Come to think of it, if I was able to fix the pump in half an hour, that means that Shiels’ experts should have been able to fix it in less time than me! Meaning they would have made a quick $125.00 for doing the labor part of what was actually a simple job! Hmmm? Sounds like the electric motor business would be a good one to be in!
Oh well, maybe in my next life! LOL!
Guess that’s it for this week!
Thanks for tuning in and I look forward to talking to you all again next time in The Ontarion Report!
Bye for now…GREG.
PS: Something To Think About>
Did you know that all 50 States are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the US $5 bill? Amazing eh?
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Have a good one..
the doug
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