Mooring chains

After spending most my winter working inside, I went down to the harbor on a spring morning. My friend Brad, a lobsterman with a marine construction business, was at the controls of the crane by the wharf. He was loading barrels of steel chain onto the deck his work barge.

 "Hey, come over here!" He yelled at me, "What are you doing?!"

 "I just came down to see somebody doing real work," I returned.

 "You need to get out of your head and come out with us. We need another pair of hands."

I might have known better than to go down to the town dock on an almost not-cold day in early April. There is a lot of real work to be done. And thus I got commissioned into inspecting and replacing mooring chains.

These days we tend to think of chains in only negative terms. But chains are mostly good, and we need them to be strong.

A mooring is strong and permanent anchoring system, set in a known place, usually in a safe harbor. The whole point of a mooring is to be dependable and never move. The buoy on the surface that a boat is secured to, is itself shackled to heavy steel chains descending to a granite block on the bottom of the sea. 

There is a fundamental rule for anything in or on the water: Everything wears out will eventually break. But a mooring must not break. Its whole reason for being is to keep a boat still when the external forces of wind and waves and currents try to pull it away. Sometimes reality is symbolic.

My days on the mooring barge reminded me that it's not the obvious things - like strain and kinetic tension - that wear out mooring chains. In real life they break down on deeper, unseen levels. The damage being done can't be seen as it's happening. You can only see the result, and by then it's too late.

Marine electrolysis is the deterioration of underwater metal components caused by electrical currents passing through water. The tendency - the desire, if you will - for electrons to be drawn into electrical circuits in sea water leads to pitting of even the most hardened steel.  Only by attaching an anode, that is, another kind of metal, such as zinc, that will sacrifice itself to save what it's committed to, can the cycle of destruction be thwarted. But it's economically and physically impractical to attach enough sacrificial anodes to mooring chains.

So we inspect and replace the chains as needed. The busier the harbor, the more frequently the chains become useless, too diminished to be trusted hold anything important safe and still.

I think about how I live these days, immersed in a solution of electrified social media, news charged with endless opinions, and the incessant noise of the urgent and immediate Now This! I can't help but sense that unseeable parts of my body and soul are being drawn away to complete other circuits, leavingme pitted, thinner, weaker, bent.I know I'm stretching the metaphor, but it sure seems real.