Yesterday we bought the concrete mixer we had promised to Goodman a while ago to do very necessary work on the concrete gullies, planting poles and other maintenance work around the reserve.
To put it together and hand it over was not quite in the plan for today but, on the way to the reserve, it started to rain and we had to change our plans. The weather report had not warned us of the possibility so we were totally unprepared, didn’t even take raincoats. The Fovs room was transformed into a workshop and, following the detailed instructions, it didn’t take long to put it all together.
The hacking group was rather lost as it was too wet to venture out and I tried to keep them busy changing the blade on the brush cutter, collecting rocks for the trail signs, potting up things but you could see that, after yesterday’s good hack, their heart wasn’t quite in it.
Fortunately the rain stopped after tea and Keith gladly volunteered to do some more chainsawing while the rest of us tackled a job that has been on our list for quite a while and that is to clear around the Brabejam tree behind the Xhosa huts. While we were working hard Tony and cohorts kept themselves occupied by burning some brush near the huts and, much to our horror, also pulled the old thatching out of the roof of the small hut and burned that. On inquiring it has apparently been decided to demolish that one but Tony reassured us that he will definitely fix up the big one. That section around the huts has been quite an eyesore for a while now and hopefully it will get some attention soon.
After lunch we were left alone and walked part of the 3Dam trail to affix some missing signs on the logs and are now happy to say that the trail has been fully signposted.
We had just finished when Goodman arrived and we could handover the mixer. It was touching to see how grateful he was. It can’t be easy for him to run the reserves whilst all the while his budget gets cut.
There was still some time left so we went back to the main picnic site to continue cleaning up and we made good progress even though the saw wasn’t quite performing. The reason was clear when back home I checked the air filter which hasn’t been cleaned since we got the saw and found it rather clogged.
It was interesting to see that Sisani had closed the stopcocks on our water pipe because he suspected a leak was the cause of water streaming through the culvert while, most probably, it is the increased runoff after the controlled burn and the removal of the blue gums. It might stop raining one of these days and then we can check for sure.
On balance what started as quite a miserable turned out to be quite a productive one.