this website has gone ballistic.

Yup, kudos to @Tideland Prius, he's "done something for America".

 

When you get zero alerts on threads you follow, no activity - as though we were all napping - or the zombie apocalypse was underway, you pretty much know things are down ...... again

 

'This website has gone ballistic'... and apparently, unintentionally bunker-busting as well

 

I always send a note on the Facebook “PriusChat” but everything has an “End of Life.” Someday, iPriusChat might not come back and that will be a sad day … or a new beginning.

Bob Wilson

 

I always save anything gen2 and 3 I think may be useful. Most renamed for clarity. I have many gb of such in an easily searchable location.

 

As the cook said in the Gordon Lightfoot song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald:

it’s been good to know you.

 

Worked on a 40-foot commercial fishing boat off the coast of Central California about the time that song came out. It was just myself and the skipper, fishing about 40 miles offshore in 1,100 feet of water for rock fish.

It was a 1950s era diesel with some sort of GM engine IIRC.

Anyway November Santa Ana winds came up, gusting to 70 mph and quickly turned the placid Pacific into a raging monster.

We were O.K. as long as we kept the boat "quartering" into the 30-foot wind waves. That is do not head directly into the waves, but turn the bow about 25 percent to starboard and ride right over them. Luckily, few, if any of the waves were breaking.

All good, until the Jimmy engine quit. I checked out the engine, which included going under the deck -- this was a small boat -- under deck meant on my belly with half-foot to spare from the bottom of the deck. No standing room, just slither on my belly room. We could not figure it out, meanwhile sent a useless mayday. This was an old boat. No radar, no loran or any other aids to navigation except a compass and paper charts.

Knew we were going to die, as all the boat needed to do was to turn broadside to the waves and it would flip over....without an engine it is tough to stay headed bow forward.
The skipper broke out the good whiskey and we toasted to a quick and painless death.

Somehow, we were knocked about mercilessly, but we did put out a sea anchor, which is a parachute-like contraption that more or less helps keep you pointed into the waves. Quartering is better, but...

Well, managed not to sink.

As the seas calmed, Coast Guard found us some 16 hours later.

I have had a couple near-deaths, but none that drug on as that...

Oh, the song Mendel mentioned...it was a big hit at the time and we sang it a few times as we prepared to die.

Do not recall exactly was up with the engine, but bet it was an electrical issue. I worked that boat for several months and it was always electrics wigging out.

 

Wow.

 

Ditto to that... seriously, wow

I've nearly drowned twice (once in 40 ft of water as a 5yo hanging on then not so much, to an inner tube whilst my father spearfished nearby... and saving my brother from drowning in an irrigation reservoir we were fooling about in, which nearly got me too) so have this definite tension around true stories of nearly drowning / dying at sea (grandfather on my mother's side was a fisherman who died at sea)

As for Gordon Lightfoot... 'Beautiful' never fails to calm and brighten my thoughts. Could be because it reminds me of a lot of Hawaiian slack-key guitar songs:

Like this one: