Fishing for keys!

It's been a tough couple of weeks for me and I've not been able to bang a blog post out. That probably means I owe the Hackspace £50 as I did promise I'll penalty myself £50 if I don't write a post a week. Well we'll see I don't like reneging on a promise but I also don't like giving away money.

The saddest Captain's hat in the world yesterday

The week started fairly badly when I left my netbook power adaptor in Nottingham (I now live in Bristol). I'd lent my wife (who was working on a murder trial in Birmingham) my MiFi which is the only way I can get online on the boat. Having no power adaptor for the netbook meant that McDonald's and other flavours of FREE (and no doubt evil) WiFi were not an option. Dragging my ancient power adaptor only Ubuntu laptop to Bristol Hackspace was the only way I was going to get any work done for the Derby Mini Maker Faire (which is on the 3rd June btw). I packed my huge Ubuntu laptop into my bag grabbed my bike, bike lock and Hackspace keys with the bike lock key on. At either end of the pontoon I live on is a big gate with a padlock on it. I'd manoeuvred my bike through the gate and was about to lock the padlock up behind me. I had one of those weird involuntary spasms we all have from time to time and somehow flicked the Hackspace (and bike lock keys amongst others) off the karabiner I keep them all on and into the harbour. As if in slow-mo I lunged out and watched them sink. I ran back to the boat and grabbed the 10ft boat pole that's lashed to the side. Pushing it down as straight as I could I discovered that the harbour in that spot is more than 10ft deep. Annoyingly I had to accept that these keys were gone... FOREVER!

Here is the thing about Hackspaces, a lot of people have a lot of ideas about how to do things, but often they don't DO those things. I think I've developed a "RULE 3" filter in my head somehow. They don't have Rule 3 at Bristol Hackspace so the bike shedding was rife. The one repeated theme I heard was "GET A MAGNET ON SOME STRING!" I heard it so many times I thought I had to do it just so I could say, "Yeah I've done that." David W (the Bristol Hackspace treasurer) very kindly provided me with a stack of HDD magnets (very powerful had my fingers bitten by them a couple of times) and I borrowed a long reel of string from the Hackspace stationary pot.

It was past 23:00 before I got back to the harbour. I put a head torch on and went out to fish. I determined that this bit of the harbour was 12ft deep. That's pretty deep really, the draught of the SS Great Britain is 16ft and I'm talking about a bit of the harbour near the edge. Anyway I tentatively started plopping the magnet in and dragging it about. Almost straight away I got some feedback. There must have been some girders or re-bar down there as the magnet was attracted to something immoveable (by me I mean). Dipping that thing in and dragging it about on such a calm evening was very soothing. Before long it was no longer about fishing for keys and was about finding anything metallic for the magnet to stick too. I'd have been pleased to pull a nail up really. I did get a number of rusty tiny chunks of iron. I'm not sure what they could be from. Maybe the remains of some industrial process or bits that have rusted to almost nothing. THEN SUDDENLY ... I'd got a bite. I could feel I was lifting something. I was more than 2m from where I thought the keys had gone in. I pulled the string a little too eagerly and I felt the line lighten. More carefully this time I lowered the magnet again. A slight change in weight... did I have it? Surely whatever I'd caught wasn't still attached?

Cautiously I wound the string in. My muscles playing tricks on me that the weight was actually the same as it ever was BUT NO! I'd somehow found my keys! They smelt a bit like fish and they were a little tarnished and already rusty in places. But I'd saved myself at least £25 in deposit costs on the Bristol Hackspace keys as we'll as ensuring I had spares for my different bike locks.

So there must be a lesson here right? Well I'm not sure there is. I could say something about optimism or having a try. I could say something about simplest solutions being the best or dogged determination. I could talk about chance and probability or get very nerdy about search patterns, the depth and flow of current in the harbour or about the distance from where they went in to where they were resting. But I'm not going to. Still I have to admit I've been in a much better mood since I found my keys.