Cigar city.

My newest venture was to drain this pool that I spotted about four years ago. At the time it was about half-full, and there wasn't much sign of transition. It was put low on the priority list and forgotten about, until about three months ago when Allen Russell, a Tampa local, and I went and gave it a second look. The pool was completely full from the insane hurricane season we had this year. Tampa got hit by one and the rest of Florida got annihilated by two others, one of which was a category five, the highest category on the hurricane destruction charts. Three hurricanes in one season--that has not happened in well over 75 years. Regardless, the motivation was a little stronger this time and it was settled that this pool could be full no longer. I then called Ryan Clements over at the Skatepark of Tampa and told him I needed some help with labor, and he obliged very quickly. I rented a three-inch garbage pump and met Ryan over at the pool to scope it out and strategize and get a game plan on how we were going to attack this beast. Our first obstacle was this one enormous tree lying in the shallow end, and our second was a boat some asshole dumped. Our third was ... where do you pump 30,000 gallons of shit? We did not want to flood the whole neighboring trailer park (a trailer park in Florida? No). We couldn't help but fire the pump up to see just how it worked at pumping the sludge. About an hour into it and the pool was more than half-drained and the first signs of tranny were sighted. The day after that, Ryan assembled a team of five kids and we met there to start draining this mammoth. They don't make pools like this in Florida anymore because of the water table. Ultimately, the pool would float if the water table was too damn high, so this pool was obviously more than 40 years old. It was going to take a long time to get this thing skateable. We all originally went there thinking we would be able to stay moderately clean. Yeah, well, that's not how this shit works The whole day was spent trying to keep the filter on the end of he big pump from getting clogged up.

By the time that the pool was only a few feet deep at most, Chris Lehman said fuck it, and jumped right in to begin cleaning the filter by hand. The pool got so gnar that we couldn't pump anymore and had to resort to using buckets in an old fashioned line. Ryan left shortly after that and the rest of us stayed until it was done; at least kind of done. We skated it a little bit but it was covered in algae, which needed to dry and then be scraped off--we know this now. The remaining day and the days that followed are the best days I have ever experienced on my board. I think the same can be said for all of the 30-plus people that have now skated the thing. The owner of the abandoned lot the pool sits on came there one day when we were skating and couldn't even really contain his excitement. "So you guys just did this--to do it?" he said.

Michael Derewenko

Tampa, Florida

Beers, Buckets, and Barneys III.--T-ed