At last, we think we’re parade ready

As many of you read this, we will be putting the final touches on our Fantasy Fest float in preparation to roll down Duval Street Saturday night for the annual parade.

Not being one of the sponsor teams that simply purchases a float from someone else, we started construction early this year to ensure we were done on time. After all, we were attempting to build a mobile, functioning water park, not a small feat of engineering for a bunch of folks who would rather drink and throw beads than runs saws and swing hammers.

The rough build work was done relatively easily. Then we got rained out one day. No big deal. We had time.

Then we got rained out again. And again. And things began to get a little critical.

But we persevered and got the major stuff done, the water park fired up and operational, leaving the little things like painting and decorations to be done in the final few days.

After a successful trial run of the water park apparatus on Sunday, we were feeling pretty good about ourselves.

Then came Monday morning.

For the last month, we’ve been warning everyone who came to work on the float that there were no shoes allowed in the lagoon once it was in place. We used a pool liner on top of a hard wooden surface. One snag and we were done for.

Well, guess what, someone stepped in with shoes on.

Monday there was a small trickle of water leaking out from under the liner. But because the liner wasn’t stretched as tightly as we might have wished, there were wrinkles that allowed the water to find its own route to get out from under the lagoon. We didn’t seal the lagoon because we wanted to be able to see a potential water leak before it just flowed over the top. That worked.

We used the wrinkles to our advantage after searching for the hole in the liner for 30 minutes and having no success.

We pulled out the air compressor and used it to shoot air under the liner, creating a bubble. We worked the bubble across the bottom (with bare feet) until we saw the bubble geyser coming to the surface and knew we had spotted the leak.

The liner was cut in the perfect shape of a staple edge. There was probably one, single, lonely staple that had been left in the deck from last year that we failed to catch during one of our crawl-across-the-deck sessions to make sure we pulled all the staples. That was a waste of time.

We had a patch kit, but it works best when the liner is dry. It works under water, but our goal is not to irrigate Duval Street, thus we had to drain the water and apply the patch.

A few hours later we were able to put water back into the lagoon and found no signs of any leak. That worked.

A few hours later, during a test run of the patched lagoon, the primary generator threw a rod. I’ll have to blame co-sponsor Bobby for that one. The generator was 13 years old and he never changed the oil.

So he went for another generator (don’t trust just one) and we spent the evening remounting that. The engine was the same, the generating unit was the same, the gas tank was different.

That’s significant to us because the primary generator is mounted under the deck. The gas tank was a little larger and lower profile. First we had to rearrange the support mechanism, which went well, and then mounted the gas tank.

The generator receives gas by gravity feed. The tank, being low-profile, was too low to gravity feed.

After many pulls on the starting cord (brand new generator) and no fire, we discovered that there was no gas flow.

We tossed the tank up on the deck and fired up the generator. Everything came to life and life was good again.

We cracked a beer. The next day Bobby remounted the gas tank and life was really good.

But Murphy is our nemesis.

He hides behind walls and skulks around in the corners.

We are on the lookout for him. I personally think he’d make a great addition to the water flow of the water park on wheels.

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