Dingy Davit… OMOO talks…

EXPECTATION VERSUS REALITY

This story about the Dingy Davit was written by OMOO, who has a voice too!!

I am a very small space to share with people, but I need them to get me out and about. They like to call themselves names like Skipper, 1st Mate, or crew.  Sometimes it’s confusing who is who.  The moments lived in my belly can go from the sublime to the ridiculous in a big hurry.  You will totally get this if you’ve met the Skipper and his 1st mate.

I found the Skipper  7 years ago and he has looked after me well.  He’s a very interesting sailor who likes to do impossible things no one has ever heard of before.  He keeps filling me up with tools and equipment, mostly various sizes and shapes of stainless steel and rubber things.   He loves to rub all my parts and pieces with this smooth, slippery stuff, which makes me feel very excited and relaxed all at once.  The more often he does it the better I feel!

This guy often gets up in the middle of the night and gets all excited, “I’ve figured out how I’m going to make that.”  Apparently his brain works best while he’s sleeping.  In the morning while concocting his special breakfast of oatmeal, potatoes, carrots, beets, coleslaw and honey he’ll stare at this small red rectangle machine, clicking away on part of it, and soon after boxes and boxes of  things start getting hauled onto me.  These boxes can lay around for months and clutter me up so bad that guests have no place to sit  or walk.

Eventually this woman showed up who seems to be sticking around.  She goes away sometimes for a long time and I wonder if it’s because she doesn’t understand why things aren’t getting done.  But she always comes back!!   She sometimes calls herself Sideways Sally and  LOVES to play around with these little gadgets that click and flash, then later she and the Skipper look at that red thing again and they both sit there among the boxes and laugh and giggle for hours.  They  both stare at their rectangle machines so long some days I worry they’re stuck to them.

One time after all the parts and pieces got sorted out I heard this loud noise starting up beside me, outside on those long wooden things that float up and down, squeak and hold the long thick pieces of string that tie me up here.  The “crew” had shown up and the machine started screaming off and on for hours.  I really like this guy they call crew, he’s very calm and polite and seems to help everything go smoothly, there’s a couple of other people like him that come over often.  The Skipper and they chat about the thing getting built and talk for hours.  They all seem  to know what they’re talking about.   No one was really able to explain what was happening with the machine, and all the pieces of steel, but the skipper seemed to be figuring it out slowly and surely.  He says he changes his ideas often so that’s why it takes him longer to finish things.

The funniest thing that happens over and over when all this is going on is that there’s big splashes, followed by “Shit, crap…. oh no, that was the mother of all screw drivers!” or “quick, go borrow Bob’s big magnet, that was my best crescent wrench.”  Then everyone sits down for awhile and drinks something that makes them all more fun.  More and more people gather and stare at all the stuff laying around, they scratch their heads and start drinking the funny stuff in cans too.  I think this might be the reason things take longer to get done.

The next day alot of people come along and want to know what’s happening and say things like, “You should probably try this on land” or “what do you think about getting someone else to drill those holes for you?”  The skipper gets up from hours of toiling away and starts putting all these pieces together and attaches them to my dingy.  I don’t always know how this will turn out, so I take to guessing.

This is a problem for me cause I’m a pretty boat and I like to stay that way.  So I picture things being added to me that make me even more pretty, plus I do love to sail along on the ocean like a large butterfly and I don’t want anything slowing me down.  So… my imagination runs away and I start dreaming and forming expectations.  “wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to drag my dingy around anymore” or “wouldn’t it look nice if my dingy wasn’t all covered in barnacles and ocean slime?”  I think about this so much that I start worrying that it will never happen.

Then one day I got some action on all that dreaming.  This very interesting contraption made of all the stainless steel and rubber pieces attached itself onto my stern and with alot of chatter on those wooden boards from alot of different people, the dingy was suddenly standing on my stern.

Now I’ve been carrying her around for a few years, and all my dreams have come true.  My expectations were surpassed by reality in a way I could never have imagined.  I’m just happy I found this Skipper, he has made my life so much easier!!

Have a look, this is the Skipper’s Amazing Dingy Davit built in 2014.