Monday, April 18, 2011

Magical Fire Hose















Over the past year I have paraded into over half of the fire houses in the KC area looking for old fire hose to use primarily as chafe protection on our docklines. The scene usually went something like this.....(picture Elle Woods from movie Legally Blond for the below - it helps. NOT that I am Reese Whitherspoon but mainly it's the character Elle Woods)
I stumble upon a fire house while out and about, flip a U, park, wonder in to the bowels of said firehouse, find some firefighter guy and then explain that I am a sailor looking for old fire hose to use on my sailboat for chafe gear and blah, blah, blah and flip blond hair for affect (sadly it helps in certain situations). After some blank stares, head scratching and the 10-15 second delay of processing all that was completed, said guy or guys would generally do a search and find that they have already pitched their old stuff. I just couldn't score any of the stuff.
Dad to the rescue. My good old hometown firehouse had a big roll. Dad procured and shipped it on down to s/v Honey Ryder last fall. It was a huge box - 50ft. Unfortunately it was the harder type fire hose vs the fabric so not good for chafe gear on docklines. What now? We had 50ft of the stuff in a huge box. We pushed it around to various areas of the boat for storage. But slowly we have found a thousand other applications for it and now find it very handy.

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