On this lazy, hazy summer day in August, it seems like a good time to “clear off the spike,” as we used to say in the newspaper biz, and check back on a couple of items we mentioned in the not-too-distant past.

• In May, Alayna Wool de Tecu, daughter of longtime Marine Fabricators Association member Terri Madden of Sand Sea and Air Interiors in San Juan, Puerto Rico, appeared on the TV reality show/contest “Hit3001.com,” the island’s version of “Shark Tank.” The show’s name honors island favorite son Roberto Clemente, who scored 3,000 hits in his major league baseball career, and its aim was to find Puerto Rico’s 3,001st “big hit.” The goal of the government-backed program is to fund emerging entrepreneurs.
  Alayna didn’t win the big prize—that went to a boutique chocolatier—but she says the exposure for her “SandySea” collection of beach bags was invaluable and she is moving ahead with her project. You can see her discussing her work at the shop, though your command of Spanish had better be considerably better than mine, and view her products.
• Last spring I’d made a fleeting reference to an adventure I once had aboard the fabled riverboat Delta Queen. After years of plying the rivers of Middle America, the boat—listed on the National Register of Historic Places and classified as a National Historic Landmark and a National Treasure of the National Trust for Historic Preservation—was consigned to a riverbank near downtown Chattanooga where it enjoyed a brief period as a hotel. That enterprise ended after a few years, and the boat sat idle until earlier this year when it departed for Houma, La., where Cornel Martin and his Delta Queen Steamboat Company LLC partners are working to put the boat under a full renovation, estimated to cost some $7 million (that’s gotta include some serious fabrication work!), with a target of navigating the rivers again in 2016. We’re keeping our fingers crossed.