A hectic day

The morning started with the team back on the heath removing gorse and saplings, and getting thoroughly pitted in mud in the process.

Some ambitious members of the group even decided to tackle a few old and rather large stumps that had begun to send off runners in all directions.

While all of this was going on Willie was fixing the ponds at the wetland, and a few extra people continued to sort through and remove old timber from behind the workshop in order to turn the area back into a safe and useable timber store.

Half way through lunch we got a call from Willie who had really cracked on, finishing the wetland ponds much earlier than anticipated.  This meant that we needed to rush out in order to prepare a route through the scrapes towards the vole pond for the digger.

No small task in itself, as it required lifting and carrying large sections of boardwalk to the side and securing any cables running underneath.

Once clear of boardwalks Willie was able to make his way through the scrapes doing what work needed to be done; in the meantime we had to get ahead of the game and cut a path through to the vole pond via net rides 17, 4 and 5.

Unfortunately, with half of the team in the process of cutting a way through to the Vvole pond, one of the tracks came off the digger meaning that we needed to down tools and head over to give Wille a hand getting it back on.

At this point Steve had to head over to Piave sharpish to give Tony a hand loading owl boxes in preparation for our big day out at Warcop tomorrow, but not before putting the boardwalks back to how they were.

Not too long afterwards Willie was catching up again and made it to the lower pond just in time for us to break the pull cord on the water pump (cue me running back to the workshop for the necessary tools and cord to fix it).

After another short maintenance break we were back on track and well prepared to start all over again first thing tomorrow morning.