I keep checking Todd’s blog to see if he has written about his new best friend but haven’t seen anything yet so I thought I’d go ahead and tell you about him. Well – we aren’t sure if it is a him or her or many hims or hers.

Todd has never seen his new best friend but has seen what he can do. Last year about this time we went up to the lake and took the pontoon boat out for a very nice ride. The next time we went up there is when Todd discovered his new best friend(s). He went to take the cover off of the boat and found lots of stuffing all over the place. Yes – Ricky the raccoon had gotten under the cover and shredded all of the seats on the boat and did his business all over the carpet and everywhere else you can imagine. All new seats and carpet had to be ordered and we ended up not having a boat all summer.

Well guess who we ran into again? Yes – Ricky. This year, however, we never even took one ride on the boat. He got in there again and thankfully didn’t shred the seats but scratched some of them with his claws and did tear up the captain’s chair a bit. This year’s prank was pooping all over everything. Yes – he is very regular and can pretty much go like a large dog does if you get my drift here.

We had family up on Sunday so even though Todd discovered the mess on Sunday he pretty much stayed away from it until yesterday. It took him most of the day to get the boat cleaned up. I did very hesitantly offer to help but I think he knew it would be very hard for me to do. For some reason the older I get the more things like that bother me.

The next thing to do was to find a way to cover up the hole where the boat cover doesn’t cover the boat. Back where the ladder is there is a space where the raccoon was getting in. We tried to think of all kind of things to put there from a Velcro cover to wire, etc. We even talked about trapping Ricky and putting him in the raccoon relocation program. We finally decided to put boat bumpers in there. We decided we needed new ones anyway because Ricky had did his business on them too and the ropes attached to them were a mess also. So – we picked up some new ones thinking that if they didn’t work to block off the hole we could still use them on the boat for docking. We also put a sign next to the boat saying “We have moved next door – please visit our boat there. Thanks!”