fishin' piers...

Re: fishin' piers...

Moses Yoder in White Pigeon, MI

>Wood under water will not rot; I'm not really qualified to explain why, so will leave to someone with at least a bachelors degree. A lot of times piers will rot off where the wood meets the water, but depending on the type of wood and treatment they can last for longer than people do. Lots of wood is being pulled out of lakes, cut, dried and used.

Something to do with oxygen deprivation

Bill Houghton, Sebastopol, CA

>Apparently, past a certain depth, water won't hold enough oxygen to sustain the critters that feed on the wood.

Re: Something to do with oxygen deprivation

David Miller from Iowa

>In the 1960s, my grandad pulled a huge old growth walnut tree out of the lake we live near, had it sawn and used it. Says he remembered that it was toppled in a 1936 tornado that went through. It was out on a point on the lake and went in. The part above the water rotted, but the other part was fine - no depth required, just submerged.

Drew Langsner's "Green Woodworking" has an interesting note that one can store logs in ponds, etc, until ready for use. The reason one would do this is so that you can still work it as if green (rive it, etc).

There was also that thing in the Michigan UP about 15 years ago - when they loggged the place out around 1900, a bunch of the logs sunk at the mouths of the rivers because there were so many that they couldn't get them to the saw mills fast enough. A bundle of huge white pines were down there as good as the day they were logged. There was a big lawsuit because a guy was pulling them out and the State said they belonged to the government.

Happens here too. (Warning: history lesson :-)

Mark Harrison -- in Sydney, Australia

>On the west coast of Tasmania, there was a penal establishment called Macquarie Harbour. This was when Australia was the British dump for convicts so this was a penal establishment within a penal establishment. As such you would not be surprised to hear that this was just one step removed from hell.

One of the tasks that convicts under punishment did was logging of timber. This was floated out to places where it could be loaded on to ships. There was no road between Macquarie Harbour and the rest of Tasmania so everything went by ship.

All the handling of logs was done by convicts in the water. The west coast of Tasmania has nothing but sea between it and Antarctia and having sailed through the Southern Ocean myself in the Navy, I can attest to the cutting cold conditions these poor wretches would have experienced.

As you can imagine in a forced labour situation, not everything went to the supervisors' plans and some of these logs never made it to their destination. These logs were eventually salvaged but more than a hundred years later and they were as sound as they were when they went in.