Lake Tips

Nasty, rusty steel pipes can be dangerous. A cut from one is an automatic trip to the emergency room, due to the amazing number of organisms living in lake water that are delighted to find their way into your bloodstream. You’ll get a serious course of antibiotics and a lecture about these opportunistic organisms from the ER doctor.

I learned this trick from my dearly departed lake neighbor, Gale Good, who was quite the genius at solving practical problems. You’ll need to get an old car jack, not a hydraulic one that spins, but one where the handle “jacks” up and down, (which is why they’re called car jacks, by the way). If you don’t have one, there are so many of these old jacks around, junk yards will either give you one or charge very little. Now you need to wrap something around the wooden post that the jack can hook onto. I use a chain, others have used nylon straps or ropes. I prefer a chain because I know it’s not going to break or stretch.