We had several straight days of heavy rain this week, which kept me from tending to the pool maintenance when I usually would do it on Thursday. By Friday afternoon, it was still raining, but not as heavily, so I figured I was just gonna have to bite the bullet and go out to do whatever I could to start recovering the pool while the rain was at least a little lighter.
If the pool didn’t overflow the night before, then I know it must have gotten close. The water level was already pretty elevated when I went to bed Thursday night, and I was awakened in the night to the thunder and torrential downpour. As a result, tons of tree debris had washed off the roof of the house and fallen into the pool. I started out by skimming the top of the pool to get out some of the tree droppings. There was already plenty of it that had sunken to the floor of the pool, so we’d have to do a good vacuuming once the weekend came around. But for now, skimming was the best I could do. Then I went to empty the return baskets and the pump basket. The pressure in the filter was pretty high, so I figured my husband would also have to backwash when he got home.
As soon as I took the cap off the first return basket, I stepped back and gasped! All I could see was that there was some sort of dead, hairy animal floating in the top of the basket! GROSS! It looked bigger than it actually was, but all I could see was brown hair and a part that revealed skin underneath. There was a live June-bug crawling around on the carcass. Ugh!
I did not want to touch the basket with my hand in case whatever it was wasn’t completely dead yet, so I grabbed a hand trowel nearby and slid it through the lip of the basket to pull it straight up and out. As the water drained to the bottom, I could see that the unknown critter was clearly…a RAT!!!!!!
I merely put the basket up high where my dogs wouldn’t mess with it and left it for my husband to dispose of when he got home. He simply dumped the basket into a ziploc bag so he could put it in the trash. Nasty!!! Look at that ugly, disgusting tail! So gross…I could hardly look at it.
I’m assuming it accidentally made its way into the pool in the blinding rain and couldn’t get back out, so it drowned and got sucked into the return basket. We know a colony of rats lives in the retaining wall between our backyard property line and the neighbor’s elevated driveway. Technically, they live underneath his driveway and come out into our yard through the bricks in the retaining wall. So awful, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it! We knew there was an issue when we moved here, because the previous owners had left tons of black bait boxes in the bushes by the fence. We’ve seen them running along the fence and around the pool equipment by the fence on our security cameras at night, and they’ve even stolen stuff from my garden between our driveways (yuck!). We’ve tried putting bait out, but there’s just no way to get rid of them all. Our dogs sometimes tag team in keeping them away from the house and pool equipment, thank goodness.
Anyway, that rat was definitely an unwanted visitor and was probably the most exciting thing that happened to me this week! I could do without ever finding one again. I think it was worse than the year I found a snake coiled up in the other pool return basket. I just never know what I’ll find when I reach my hand in there! LOL
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