one of the worst things you can drop in a swimming pool!!!!

[Poconos]

Tenax, I gather you dropped the whole utility knife in the pool and not just the blade. In either case I'd take the vacuum head off the pole, tape the hose to the pole, then approach the knife from the handle end and the suction should suck it right up the hose into the skimmer. It should fit inside a typical 1.25" diameter hose. Assumes your vacuum hooks to a skimmer. Also, a good source of strong magnets are old hard drives.
Al

[sailork]

Thanks for the info Tenax, it hand't occured to me how dry it would be up north. Down here it's almost always better than 80% relative humidity in the morning all year round.

I keep forgetting about the motor magnets in hard drives. I've got a few that are ready for scrap. Maybe I'll string a few magnets together and sell them on eBay as some kind of techno-voodoo bracelet.

[tenax]

actually, poco, i dropped just the blade..don't know how well it would have vacuumed up. i'll keep your tip in mind if i ever am stupid enough to have a knife near pool again!

sailor- yeah, we have pretty low humidity in alberta..furniture can crack..you always have to keep antiques well oiled and such or splitsville can happen. it's 10am mst right now, 15C outside (average for this time of day year) and the RH is currently 55%

[CanuckPool]

The worst thing to drop into a pool would be clear broken glass.

[sailork]

The worst thing to drop in a pool would be a glass bottle of fine single malt whiskey.

The glass comes up with a vaccuum and crossed fingers, but I've never figured out how to get the "nose of ancient peat" out of my filter and back in the bottle.

[medvampire]

They had just finished the pool and my kid picked up one of the screws the installers had dropped on the ground. I was mid sentence saying not to throw any thing over or in the pool and I hear a plunk. I ask what he had tossed and he told me it was one of the screws. Well it was dark I gave him a good verbal reminder of why it is a bad thing to toss any thing in the pool and retreated to the house. Next morning I grab one of the left over screws and sure enough it was non-iron based so no magnet would work. Got the pole and wrapped some duct tape sticky side out and went fishing. After about an hour of eye busting searching screw located at the bottom. Grabbed taped pool pole and held the taped end on the screw for around minute or so and pulled up. Screw came with the pole about 3 foot and dropped. I spent the next 30 minutes getting the screw to out of the pool. Little later my future wife called from work asking what I had been doing all morning and I told her I had been “screwing around” … “really”…”in the pool”…”click” .. Things were kind of cold around the house for a few days until I told her what had happened and the kid agreed with my story.
Steve