good morning francis and i are out here at the uh tulsa port of katusa in the heart stand we're
watching trains francis likes training through road trains freight trains for 20 something years
i've been learning a lot about riding freight trains
we could ride this one talking about getting it thrown out of the port that'd be a great way to do
it we are here on the hard stand that's sb seeker back behind us there and uh it's been a good week
no progress on insurance yet all right enough of that no progress on insurance yet well i think
there's progress but you know the progress is you let other people that do that job do their job
and so brad's working on it i haven't heard back from amy yet we got another idea uh from
one of our engineering friends zach and that's in progress too so something will shake loose
i think the most important thing that we can learn here is patience and from the comments that i've
been getting we are a short supply of patients in this world all right things happen at the
pace that they have in that your life happens at the pace it happens at life gets in the way
and if all we spend is our time getting frustrated and about that you're not going to get anything
done because um that's just the way it is you got to be patient you know keep your effort applied
and be patient and we've got plenty of things to do here on the boat let me show you what's
been going on i just love having a crane on the boat it is fantastic you know we can bring the
dinghy up and down we brought all the battens up the sails are stacked up there on the forward deck
uh the hard things to get in and out of here are the washing machine so the washing machines
up here now and it's getting ready to get installed and the two drawer refrigerator
that's going in lots of plumbing to do for that so uh we got the pex box out and uh
we're probably off to home depot again here the other nice thing about this delay is it's cooling
down which is lovely like here's the other thing we did we brought all the battens for the sails up
there's our morning train they work this train back and forth here
all the time it was amazing to watch the industry out here so again many thanks to
the toll supporter katusa for hosting us here and uh let's see okay let me talk a little bit about
fear you know that's a common thing but i gotta hit it because that's really what
insurance is you know it's a bet against fear and i keep thinking man our society is
getting more and more faithful and insurance certainly is underscoring that you can see
you know there's just a lack of courage all we need just a little bit of courage because the fear
mongers will say oh it's gonna break up and it's gonna sink it's like okay come on there's where it
was supported on the road out here there's the other support it's not in any water there's no
water supporting this structure at all it's all in air it's bouncing down roads at 20 miles an hour
this thing is not gonna break apart because it didn't break apart face reality it's a strong ass
boat it's steel so it comes out oh it's gonna cap size okay no this is not gonna capsize okay yes
it's a lot of heavy steel up that way right and here this is fuel tank right nice and hollow here
that is lead that is led inside there too there are 12 tons of lead at the
lowest point on this boat it is not going to capsize there is no way and she was designed
for these masks to be installed and she goes into the water without them being on there
i mean that's uh 1500 pounds of steel on the main mast there alone and without those mast installed
she is even more stable in the water so then his ear shall flood and there are some places
you could flood you could flood through the shaft log there for the propeller shaft except it has a
dripless seal on the other end of it it won't even allow a drop in and there's other places like this
hole okay we know about this hole this is the sea chest inside there's a steel pipe welded in
and it's welded in it's not a plastic fitting like you'd see on the plastic production boats
around here welded in it has two channels that come off of it and those are welded in
and then there's a valve threaded onto that that's stainless steel and it's closed not a bit
of plastic you could hit it with a sledgehammer to be fine the two other places on the boat are these
these are the vent for rain water coming down from up above anything is pumped out of the boat
from the forward cabin there's another one like this in the aft cabin there's a stainless steel
pipe welded onto here and there's a stainless steel two inch ball valve that's closed down
just inside of this so that ain't going to take on any water then all you're left with
is four soft points there are soft points because that is plastic and it can break off so you have
a plug on the inside that you can shove down into it should that happen
and you know put a block over some cribbing you can actually stop the water that way too so
if you're not prepared to do anything yeah this is a dangerous thing if you've built the whole
boat over the last 10 years and you know every little piece of it this is just it requires such
a little bit of courage to do what we're asking to be done and it's sad that our world has slipped to
a point where that little bit of courage hard to find check out the geese oh into summer
nice sound yeah they're headed out to california so let's turn our attention to all the interesting
ways that we've had ideas for getting seeker in the water there's there's seeker back over there
we're over by bird creek now and let me show you this this is bird creek and interesting that
looks like a road over there but it's actually stone uh it doesn't form a
lot here in oklahoma but it's a mudstone soft and you can see the water comes through here
deep sometimes but this is august and henry the turtle down there he just uh
knows that this is a safe place to be because it's only about a foot and a half deep there so
there is no launching seeker down this slope from up there into a foot and a
half of water now there's another creek over at rogers point which isn't very far from here
and it's the same thing it actually has a boat ramp even two lanes uh even the boaters don't use
one of the lanes because it's so shallow at the bottom end of that boat ramp and the boat ramp's
so broken up there's you know we put the tinder in over there and the tinder was sucking up mud
so the seeker drafts about six and a half feet the tinder drafts about a foot and a half it was a
lovely little walk this morning we're going out on to the point here ah look here it's bill's cousin
say good morning yeah bill's cousins oh yeah oh look wilder
well here we are for instance being the kid that's looking back into the port uh see where that tug
boat is that's the low water dock that's where the party was and if you see that blue structure right
there in the center and zoom in on that thing that is the crane that will drop us into the water it's
what co industries operates that and so all of this little stretch of river here is the uh tulsa
port of katusa that point right there is where the verdigris comes in this is the confluence
see that buoy sitting out there that buoy is the end of the ports uh domain so once we're past that
buoy we were out of the tulsa port of katusa and a lot of these ideas have said well just drag it in
down the shoreline here and you know do some earth work that is a hell of a embankment we came down
and uh this is all core of engineer land and they actually own back away from the river because when
they dredge this they put their tailings back up over on the shore in fact that short right
there is i think uh number eight or nine on their charts that's where they dump their tailings and
uh so they own all that land as well so you don't mess with core engineer land it's public property
no bulldozers anything like that or digging the earth ramps or anything like this they actually
have a lot of this river down this way and they'll actually put a rock along the shore so they'd be
really unhappy about that too that first bridge down there you go underneath that and rogers point
is just around the corner from that that second bridge down there that is port 33 and they have
a ramp on the other side of the river but it has a little skinny road seekers or wheels wouldn't
even fit down that little road and we'd have to prune a lot of trees down there has been a lot
of ideas about how to put seeker into the water and i appreciate that because it's people using
your heads and uh it is fantastic the creativity my favorite though has got to be the the balloons
okay a lot of balloons no it's uh yeah it's about 100 feet that's what i estimated yeah
right that crane down there's about a hundred feet wide and he's actually unloading coils of steel
from the barge beneath him that wall is about 45 48 feet up so that gives you some scale the
mast on seeker will go up to 52 feet so the idea is we'd launch the boat there and then we'll use
that crane or paul's crane over here at the low water dock and step our mass there that is kind
of neat seeing steel coming out of that barge this morning because that's where seeker came up out
of a barge at the coil of steel 10 years ago oh how cool look at this look at this ah it's neat
i wonder how deep it is here too because it's nothing but inches that way you think so yeah i
know so cuz i threw a stick in but this this could be a little deeper because it's nice and channeled
so when we get a rain it would definitely wash through here that's getting secret down pretty
slack water isn't it yeah the problem is where you can get the boat down to it there's no way to get
cranes in here but it is cool anyway look at this check this out this was actually man-made those
are drill bore holes along the wall there because they're evenly spaced and nice and vertical
yeah so somebody wanted this widened out it was just for drainage because you see look
see there's this hump and then that that little water is probably yeah it's weird
it goes isolated down that direction it rises out this way now i know it's
silted in down at that end because i'd pass by there and you can see the mud
but maybe they used it for a it'd make a great place to put stuff on and off of a boat
if you could get a wheeled vehicle down here that's the problem no road
eternal tied up in life