An Unwelcome Visitor

A few nights ago, around 11 pm, I was sitting in the recliner in our bedroom, reading a book. Ted was lying on the bed with his eyes closed, "listening" the Cleveland Indians game on TV. Joe and Alex were somewhere around the house.

Suddenly I heard the gate to the fence around the pool SLAM, then a HUGE splash. Being the brave person I am, I immediately woke up Ted and said, "Someone's in the pool!"

He sat up quickly and wasn't too sure where he was or what was going on. (Yeah, he was awake with his eyes closed...right). I called for Alex, to see if it had been him getting in the pool. He was in the kitchen. I called for Joe. He was in the bathroom. That pretty much led me to believe that it was someone other than the immediate family.

This picture is from a few years ago (pre-landscaping), showing how close the fence is to our bedroom. Never mind Marina, who thought she was a direct descendent of SpiderMan, and climbing the screen.

Ted got up, and instead of going out the door in our bedroom, went to the kitchen, then outside. He didn't see anything, so he came back in and got a flashlight. He went out, shone the flashlight all around the pool and saw nothing. Then he went inside the fence, and turned on the light in the pool.

Nothing.

I told him to look for water on the concrete and he saw a big splash mark by the deep end, then another, slightly smaller one, by the shallow end. By this time, Joe and Alex had gone outside to investigate too. Of course, I stood by the bedroom door to the outside and tried to stay out of the way, hahaha.

I said to Ted that I thought it was a deer. He concurred. We decided that the deer must have jumped the fence, but hit it with her hoof making the gate shake, then jumped in, swam across the pool, jumped out, and hopped over the fence again. They looked on the outside of the fence to see if perhaps there was an animal of some kind lying around, but there was nothing.

Case closed.

Or so we thought.

The next day, my folks came to use the pool and Ted relayed the whole story to them. I commented that the water level seemed really low. Ted said he had added water that morning. I said that something just wasn't right. He thought that the sun was really evaporating the water, but I disagreed. There was no way that the water level would go down 4-5" in a few hours.

As I went around the pool using the screen thing to get out a few bugs, I noticed something.

There was an upside down "V" shaped tear in the liner, near the top of the pool. We were losing water through the tear. There were also some hairs around the tear, that seemed to be consistent with those of an animal....probably a deer. Her hoof must have scraped along the edge as she went into the water.

The tear...and of course it was at the deep end, making it just a little more challenging for us to patch.

Ted went in and called the company that installed our pool, and talked to them about it, then went there to purchase a couple patch kits. They said that they've heard of this happening before, and we were fortunate that the deer got in, and then got out.

You can barely see the water line, along the lower half of the blue diamonds on the liner. The water had been up around the top of the brownish squares above the diamond.

Joe helped me patch the tear, but it's not pretty. Because the tear was in the rounded corner, I didn't have a flat surface to work on. I also couldn't stretch it enough so that all the edges met. However, it's patched, and we're not losing anymore water, and that's all that counts.

We don't mind people coming over and using our pool...but when it comes to wildlife, I just wish they'd wait until they were invited!