Tee Tattler

Hello from the IV golf course!
Kind of a short column this week as I’ve been busy at the plant replacing an interior wall and getting that all cleaned up and ready for food production.
This week Scott Kern and I took the little jaunt to get the river pump all prepared for the summer watering season. The river pump sits at the edge of a small sump hole adjacent to the river and separated by a large, tree and brush-covered berm. The bank above the sump is about 45 feet high and infested with blackberries. The bank is a 45 degree angle and a track made of steel allows the pump to be disconnected and then raised above winter high water level. There are no handrails on the track, so imagine us two “old guys” picking our way down a 45 degree angle, clearing our way of blackberry vines as we try to keep from falling off of the track, tumbling through the brush to eventually end up in the scary, dark sump water.
The first spring that Steveo and I put in the river pump, there was a submerged stump in it that was partially decayed. As the decaying gasses built up, it would slowly rise above the surface of the dark water, make a little hiss as the gas released and then slowly submerge, like some mysterious, black sea creature – it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up I tell ya.
Anyway, we needed to pull the 20-foot-long inlet pipe and foot valve out of the sump first. We had brought Scott’s Four-Runner with its winch to help but decided that we could probably do it by hand. I scampered across the steep bank and pulled on a rope that I had tied to the foot valve last year to start the thing moving toward the bank. My foot got onto a really slippery spot, and I looked like Fred Flintstone driving his car, with both feet running in place, trying to keep from sliding down the slippery mud and into the sump. I still have my cast on and was worried about getting the pins that hold the healing bone in place from getting that nasty sump water on them, as the doctor had warned me that getting a bone infection is really serious.
We got the foot valve pulled up onto the bank and removed the bolts that hold it together. In the process of pulling the bolts out, we, of course, dropped one of the nuts onto the bank. Now this is no ordinary bank, it’s slippery, muddy, steep, and has little clumps of grass here and there. After a 10-minute search, we found the nut and I carefully stuffed all of the pieces into my left pocket, as I would have never been able to retrieve them from my right, due to the cast, and I sure didn’t want Scott to try to find them in my pocket! We got it all cleaned up of leaves and mud and proceeded to tie the plastic drum back to it to keep rocks and debris from clogging it later. Now we had to hook it back to the pump elbow. Scott got on one side of it, on the steepest part of the bank and I got on the safer side, where I could hold on to the end of the track. As we pulled on the inlet pipe to get it back in place, Scott started doing the Fred Flintstone dance on a stage made of cut blackberry vines and willow fronds. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing cause Scott can get a little feisty.
We got it all hooked up and then wired a little basement sump pump that I had hauled down the track and had hooked a hose onto and placed in the water. I did the math, and that inlet pipe holds 29 gallons of water so I didn’t want to have to throw the bucket into the sump 15 times and pull it up by the rope, then pour the 3 gallons it had collected from the 5 gallon bucket, trying to get the stream into a 1 inch opening, like Luke Skywalker trying to take out the Death Star. Scott fired up the generator and it took a good 10 minutes to fill the inlet pipe. We flipped the switch to the pump, and it primed immediately. Scott looked at the water flow meter and it read 400 gpm, too much for the sump to keep up in my opinion, so I dialed it back to 300 and we started back up the bank. The pipe that crosses George Creek is made of mild steel and is attached to the underside of the bridge that allows us to get to the river, so it is mightily rusty and has several holes in it.