Getting the pool ready for summer is always a chore. I try to keep it reasonably clean in the winter, but come spring there’s always some work to do. Yesterday afternoon I was saying how nice the pool was looking. And then about 7:00 or so last night we had a storm. It started with golf ball sized hail. Then the wind picked up. The hail stones got smaller and eventually stopped, to be replaced with a pounding rain. It was quite a storm and made a mess out of our back yard, including the pool. The picture on the left shows what the pool looked like at 7:30 this morning.
I cleaned the big stuff out of the bottom, cleaned out the filter, turned on the Polaris, and let the equipment run all day. Debra hosed off the pool deck, and by 5:00 this evening the pool was almost back to its pre-storm beauty. You can’t see it in the picture, but there are some stains on the bottom from the oak blossoms that spent all night in the the pool. I’ll have to get some chemical or other to clean that up.
The trees at the far end of the pool, by the way, are red tipped photinia. They make a great hedge, but they’re not such a great thing to have near a swimming pool. The blossoms are beautiful this time of year, but the flower petals are very small and tend to plug up the works. Besides, it’s a bad idea to plant any tree so that it overhangs the swimming pool. Sap from the tree ends up staining the bottom. I’m fighting with that on this end of the pool, too, but in that case it’s the pool that was placed too close to the tree. That oak is at least 100 years old.