May 14, 2014

Little Manatee River State Park

Wimauma, FL

I worked my afternoon shift at the Ranger Station. A guy came in with his wife and young child to rent a canoe.

I had been warned that the button on the credit card machine sticks and have been extra careful when ringing up a sale. I entered $15.00 and after making sure it registered only $15.00 I hit the enter button and-yep it charged the card $1,500. OMG-I felt terrible. Luckily the man was so nice and understanding while I tried to figure out how to void the transaction. Thankfully one of the rangers was in the office. The machine doesn’t allow a transaction to be voided so she showed me how to credit the money back to this card. Whew!

At around 3PM I heard thundering. I ran outside to bring in the bikes and then as it started to drizzle I went over to the flagpole to get the flags. By the time I got the last flag down it was pouring so I spent the last couple of hours of my shift in soaking wet clothes.

I was quite concerned about the canoe renters and was very relieved when they returned safely. They said they made it back to the canoe launch before the downpour and waited out the worst of the storm in the adjacent pavilion.

Monte spent most of the day working on the brush bull rotary cutter. The prior day the plan had been to remove and sharpen the blades. However, the pins that attach the blades to the disc were frozen in place. He managed to remove one pin but could not get the other pin to budge. He sprayed penetrating solvent on the pin and let it sit overnight.

This morning when he tried to remove the pin it was still frozen. So it was on to plan B. He removed the cutter from the tractor. Then he attached a chain to the cutter to lift the cutter on its side. After safely securing the cutter he removed the castle nut from the output shaft that allowed him to remove the blade holding disc.

He moved the disc into the shop and used a sledgehammer to remove the final pin.

The crossbar assembly had cracks in it so Chris, one of the rangers, welded the cracks.

At that point Chris and Monte had to stop working on the cutter because they need a particular socket that is not in the shops inventory for proper reassembly.