| Bobcatting, Day 1 |
[Nov. 19th, 2005|08:40 pm]
wetkneefarm
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So much exciting has happened today - let's see if I can sum it up semi-concisely. Pictures and a summary of the day behind the cut.
Getting the bobcat went pretty smoothly. Up at 5, to Wartroot by 7. We transferred all of our gear from Sue Ella's truck to Joey's truck, leaving Sue Ella's truck for Joey. The hitch parts inserted into the hitch in Joey's truck without a hitch. :-) We got to the rental place before they even opened, got our bobcat in no time, and were at Sinking Creek by 10 am.
Then came the first problem. Joey's truck has pretty bald tires and didn't want to go up a little hill so that we could back the trailer into an out of the way location. We were stuck for a little while - tried putting boards under the truck's spinning tires, but that didn't help. Eventually, Mark just solved the problem by using the bobcat to move the trailer out of the way. Without the lugging the weight of the trailer, the truck was suddenly unstuck.
We needed another load of cinderblocks, and had found out last week that we could get them much cheaper (69 cents versus 84 cents) in Castlewood than where we'd been getting them. But the Castlewood place closed at noon on Saturday, so after getting unstuck we hurried over there to get our blocks. Mark waited in the truck among mounds of cinderblocks three stories high while I went into the office to find someone to pay. I had to wander down a hallway and through a door which said "No Admittance" before I found anyone, but the people I found were a thoroughly pleasant pair of guys who were obviously having lots of fun. They pulled my leg initially, telling me that they were all sold out of six inch blocks - which would have been really funny if I'd looked around me while getting out of the truck and noticed that there were thousand upon thousand of six inch blocks right there. As it was, my eyes got wide, and one guy took pity on me. Turns out that he was a preacher and soon asked me where I went to church. When I told him nowhere, he recommended a church in Pennington Gap to me - and gave me 15 blocks for free. That's the kind of preaching I can handle.
Joey was waiting for us back at the property and we quickly got to work bobcatting, making a ramp down into the creek. All was going well until the wheels of the bobcat went too far forward, into some loose dirt over top of some wet clay. And then we were good and stuck for a long, long time.
We dug out under the wheels. We tied a tow rope to the bucket of the bobcat and the other end to a tree, then slowly lifted the bucket so that the whole bobcat tilted forward - then we quickly stuffed cinderblocks under the rear wheels. Eventually, we had to build a ramp out of cinderblocks to get the bobcat back out of the creek and onto dry ground.
Our goals for the weekend have thus become a little more realistic. We're hoping to get one ramp done and the blocks set in the creek. If we manage _not_ to be stuck for hours on end tomorrow (and we may have learned our lesson), we might get more done. But I'm not going to count on it.
If you want to see how much fun it is to bobcat, check out the video clip of Joey at http://www.kitenet.net/~anna/blog/scooptodump.MOV |
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