My view to the dock

I've been not-so-patiently waiting for our custom boat cover to arrive, and it was finally installed last week! It's so darned cool, y'all, to use my remote control to cover and uncover it. Because the old playpen cover made me NOT want to take the boat out for a spin. After I had our pontoon detailed in September, I asked them to put the playpen cover back on for me because that thing is a wooly booger to wrestle back on by yourself. But it was my first line of defense to keep the bug and bird population out of the boat when it's just hanging out in its cradle lift.

With end-of-summer rug sales happening last month, I decided to purchase one to put beneath the dining set on the dock. The pattern is a little busy, but I like the feeling of movement since it's sitting over the water. You can see in the pic that I'm keeping the dining set secured with a cable and padlock. It's not that I think someone will steal it. We often get fierce winds off the water, and so I didn't want any of our chairs getting blown into the lake. Our neighbor's Adirondack chairs down near the water got flipped in during an early summer storm. I was able to drag one out of the water that got wedged against our dock walkway, but the other one was lost. 

I recently heard our dogs barking in the back yard and went to check what was causing the ruckus. Turns out it was this beautiful scene below. There are several folks on the lake with sailboats that take them out in nice weather. I don't know why I'm so intrigued by sailboats, but I think it's a majestic sight when I get to witness one skimming across the water. There's something about it that I find very relaxing, and so very picturesque. 

My view to the dock was improved recently when I ordered two planters to flank the dock gate. We had that gate installed to keep little man Finn off the dock. Initially afraid of the dock, he soon developed the bad habit of racing out on the dock to chase away any ducks, geese or herons that dared to perch on HIS property. The gate initially worked as a Finn deterrent to keep him from going for an accidental swim. However, he then started eyeing the possibility of jumping that little expanse beside the gate onto the dock. So I ordered up two really heavy planters that I wrestled from the driveway to the dock gate with a neighbor's dolly. Then I worked up a sweat carting four 40 lb bags of topsoil as well as six bags of gray beach stones to fill them, along with a couple faux cedar bushes for the time being. It looks good, so yippee for sweat equity since I didn't hire our yard service to handle it.