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Woodworth Lake levels up
Friday, December 2 2022
location: 800 feet west of Woodworth Lake, Fulton County, NY
Considering all the pot I'd eaten last night and how little I'd slept, I woke up this morning in surprisingly good condition. Usually I look forward to the morning scrum stand-up with at least a little dread, since often don't get much done on the previous day. But yesterday had, as I said, been a good productive day. (Speaking of productive, I'm still blowing large amounts of thick stringy snot from my nose and hacking up dense discolored chunks of even thicker stuff from my lungs, but I mostly feel recovered from the illness that started on Sunday.) This day didn't end up being anywhere near as productive in the remote workplace. Part of what happened was that I began drinking white wine at noon and somehow fell asleep on the upstairs beanbag, something I didn't know I'd done until I was awakened by Neville climbing into the beanbag with me. Fortunately nobody had been trying to message me.
The reason I started drinking white wine at noon was that I took a plastic cup of wine with me down to the lake to check in on my winterized dock. (There was so little snow on the ground that I was able to walk down there wearing Crocs.) I wanted to know: had the lake frozen more? Were there any ducks? Had the concrete blocks I'd propped the floating part of the dock up on started sinking into the muck? When I got to the lake, it was still a large shimmering fluid, but something about it was wrong. The floater for the hinged dock was now sitting in water, though there was no indication that it had fallen. Instead, the lake had grown dramatically higher over the past week. The floater had been about two inches above the water but now part of it was two inches below the surface, suggesting the lake had risen about four inches. Knowing how high the water was at the beaver dam at the lake's outflow, I hadn't expected it to be able to rise that much. Clearly I was wrong about that. This depressing news had me refilling my wine cup when I got back to the cabin, wondering how I was going to deal with the docks now. The water was now so deep around the fully-floating part of the dock that I probably couldn't wade into it with my rubber boots. Was I going to need to buy more concrete blocks? Where was the closest place that sells them? (The Ace in Johnstown doesn't seem to.)
Before returning to the cabin, I visited the beaver dam at the outflow to see what it looked like. Where, before, water had been escaping over the top in a couple low spots, now water was escaping over the dam along its entire length. It was hard to imagine the lake being able to get any higher now, but (as we've just seen) I've been wrong about that before. I should mention that I didn't see any wildlife at all on the lake today, though I did see more ice forming on the lake, particularly along the west shoreline of the outlet bay.
Long frost crystals on the ground on the walk down to the lake today.
Click to enlarge.
The foater on the hinged part of the dock was dipping in the lake.
The fully-floating part of the dock, now partially-submerged.
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