Pipeline – lots of talk, little work 2011.06.22

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

In amongst all the work fixing up the flatlet for the new tenant we still found time to zoot off to Van Stadens with all the materials, including a wooden box, to “quickly” pour some concrete around the offending leak. Ha, when we arrived we found that, in spite of the closed stopcock, the water was still running:

No way could we pour concrete in this cesspool, it would simply get washed away, so we started packing all our stuff into the car again when the owner of the property walked towards us with big steps, demanding what we were digging out. We assured him it was not one of his precious plants, Ellie would never do that, but instead were working on the water pipe. He didn’t even know there was such a thing and was most grateful to be alerted of its existence and we continued chatting for at least half an hour and he even offered his help if we ever needed assistance.

We didn’t quite know what to do next and returned to the reserve to see what the Wednesday crew was up to and were pleasantly surprised to see a good turnout all working hard transplanting Protea seedlings but it didn’t take too much convincing to make them stop for coffee and chatting, even more so when Rob and Marieke arrived as well. From that we took heart and decided to go back to the stopcock and see if we really couldn’t close it and on the way out met Wesley who also was in a chatty mood but eventually we made it to the stopcock and guess what, the owner of Whispering Pines was there and we made our acquaintance with him which meant another half hour interesting chat and finally managed to slow down the meter to a trickle by closing the stopcocks on both ends, still not enough though,

we will have to come back another day and first clamp a piece of inner tube around it.

Time for lunch, Ellie convinced me that Gibson’s pond was the ideal place and so it was:

except, guess what? Out came Mr Gibson with his three dogs for a chat so we really caught up on the l1ocal news today. Eventually he left and we could have lunch in peace, fortunately our new friend was very well behaved:

Back at home again we made arrangements with Neil to nail the leak on Friday afternoon.