12th December 2009

We didnt visit our new section on Wednesday as usual as the weather was not so good and we wanted to save our strength for the big attack this weekend - putting in the services. We were told we could hire a trench digger that was easy to use and required no strength to drive - yeah right!

Things started just fine, we had the materials we needed, the tool for the job,
the young strong muscle power, oh yes and Dave.

And the machine seemed to go OK

until you wanted to change course even slightly


but it seemed to be going down the hill just fine until we went back to check the trench and found the dry sand walls had all caved in

As we wanted to install the electric cable from the bottom, we changed plans and started again from the gate

but it was impossible to get the digger to work up the hill

so we started in the middle of the drive on much wetter sand, which the digger sank straight into. But at least the walls of the wet sand held their shape.

Progress was made even slower by various obstacles, an old fence post, a reel of wire and other bits of rubbish which had to be dug out manually

And as soon as any length of trench was complete we popped the cable in before any subsidence could occur.

We went to find help at the local tip and came back with some (rather nice) carpet and some lumps of wood, which helped a lot

but no sooner had we dug the machine out of one spot

it sank into another.


So much for 1 metre per minute, it took about 9 hours to dig as much of the 150 metre trench as we could and to get the cable into all but about 20 metres of it. We decided that was a job for tomorrow.