A pier, haiku version

Maybe the impulse to post the spike knife came naturally from yesterday's  nautical labor. For strictly bureaucratic reasons, I had to lengthen  my new dock before October 15. Otherwise I would never, ever, be permitted to expand it beyond the 16 feet I now want to the legal maximum of 32 feet which I may someday want. I settled for one more eight-foot section.

Technically, it is not a dock, but a pier. I've been away from living on salt water so long I fall into corn-field usage.

It will make a convenient place to tie -- chain, actually --  the canoe, and a comfortable perch for fishing.   It's on a point about 50 yards from the canal outlet to the big lake,  and the water is good for walleyes in the spring and fall.

Installing a dock is one part brute labor, another part finicky adjustment of supporting poles, a third part  lesson in not dropping tools, and a fourth laboratory work on the differing physics of moving about in chest deep water as opposed to air.