Another potential float disaster averted

As we feverishly prepare for the 2011 Fantasy Fest parade (can it truly be in just two weeks) tomorrow will be the culmination of a year of planning, designing, building, arguing, painting, and most of all, drinking.

Now much of that year was spent doing absolutely nothing, but we came up with a float concept early on when the new theme of Aquatic Afrolic was announced.

It was after much deep thought, and many beers, that we decided we wanted to do a working water park. And, because of the beer, probably, we decided that a water park had to have water slides. Functioning water slides.

Maybe a little less beer would have been advantageous to the planning process, but once the decision had been made, we forged ahead.

We hit a small snag about a month into the process when we were reminded that water slides made of wood might have a tendency to deposit splinters in the bottoms of the ladies riding the slides.

After much consternation, again more deep thought, and yes, more digging deep into the cooler of beer, along with a few hints from the reading public, we bought a pool liner to serve as both the receptacle for the lagoon into which the slides empty and for the liner for the slides.

I have to give a round of applause here to our co-sponsor Bobby at Fanci Seafood. He gives me too much beer when it comes time to dream up a float concept, then makes my crazy ideas work with the help of our other construction mates, Steve Boyett, my brother Kris, several artists and pretty girls with paint brushes.

That killed two birds with one stone (and no, we don’t throw rocks at our avian brothers, it’s just an old expression) giving us a splinter-free surface and a single-piece sealer for the water we would have to carry.

Last week, fighting off intermittent patches of rain and a decided buzz as the day wore on, we got the lagoon lined and filled. Water remained where we put it. That was a partial success.

When we installed the water pump and water actually flowed through the temporary pipe and poured back into the lagoon, we cracked a beer in celebration.

We did have one question from the parade organizers who wanted to know how we intended to keep the water from flowing off the float onto the street. Bobby wanted to tell them that we were just going to drag a 7,000-foot water hose behind us and have a guy on the back rolling it out to supply a steady stream of water. But once the beer wore off we told them of our plan to use a pool liner and they were satisfied.

The rest of the float parts, the Wet T-Shirt Tiki Bar, the band stand, the lifeguard chairs and painted décor have reached the final stages.

We have already run permanent electrical connections the length of the float and have even built independent coolers into the platform. I really think a little less beer would make us a little less creative.

So tomorrow we attempt the final, and most challenging engineering aspect of this year’s float.

We will attach the actual water slides to the platform, line them with excess pool liner and finish the plumbing run to supply the system.

The premise is this: A pump picks water up out of the lagoon, pumps it through the piping system into hoses that line the inside edge of the slides to provide a constant flow of water and make the slides slick enough for the ladies to actually slide down and feed the water back into the lagoon for the pump to pick up again. To decrease the pressure, we’re going to put two open fountains in the middle of the lagoon that again will feed back into the lagoon, back to the pump and back again through the system.

That’s the premise. We’ll find out tomorrow if it works.

Because we can’t haul a lagoon full of water on the float during transit to the parade grounds, we’ll fill it just enough to keep the liner in place and will use a friend’s water hose who lives in Key West to fill it on arrival.

But there exists just one more issue.

There were two nights last week when the temperature dropped into the mid-70s. For many that’s not cold. But it could be cold for our ladies who will be wet the entire night.

Earlier this week we set about applying our problem-solving skills to this particular question.

Now our problem-solving skills usually involve the ingestion of beer. And this session was no different.

We thought, briefly, about heating the water in some fashion, immediately discarding that idea as too hard for our limited power resources. We discussed using hot water to start with, but realized very few residential hot water heaters would supply that amount, and then the float sits out in the weather all day at the parade grounds, so the water would cool anyway.

We were almost to the end of the beer and still hadn’t come up with any ingenious method to fight the possible chill.

And then it hit us.

Beer.

We were drinking the answer. We would simply ply the ladies using the slide with more beer, the natural anti-freeze.

We polished off the beer in the cooler and considered our job done.

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