Delightful Delilah
by: Dave Irving
You may recall a recent blog in which we pumped out our wide beam barge Delilah, in preparation for clearing out her accumulated rubbish.
In case it's slipped your memory, she looked like this:
Clearing the rubbish turned out to be a little more difficult than expected. So we had more discussions about when, where, who, and how, and eventually it was decided that today was the day, the new landing stage at Ryeford was the place, who was a mix of boat team and WD, and how was a mix of hard manual labour and a mini-digger.
After removing the major large items, we could clear a path for water to flow from one end to the other, so we deployed the pump again. Another 3-4 inches of water went into the cut! With the water level down enough to keep our feet dry, we could start the hard work of digging out the accumulated rubble, mud, weeds, a bike tyre(!), bits of board, pipe and so on. It was dug into large rubble bags, which were lifted out by the mini-digger, and manually emptied onto the field. Lifting the bags by hand had been tried and found very hard work - it didn't take long to decide we loved the mini-digger!
At the end of a hard day, Delilah now looks delightful:
We have every intention of keeping her as delightful as this, so she can feel and stay smart for her forthcoming improvements. She'll be a lot more pleasant to work on, too.