Roger opened the Abbey Meads gates for our friendly Polish gardeners, Marcin & Erik at 8 AM and they worked really hard all day and in almost uncomfortably hot conditions to clear the south bank of brambles and nettles etc.  In addition the brief was to cut down the trees up to the southern corner.  To help them Roger & Martin put together the launching platform, which was used to provide a platform to get closer for cutting the main trunks of the trees, which were well out into the water as a result of the current ‘high tide’.

It was sunny all day and seemed like the first day of summer, working in shirt sleeves.  The team of Martin & Slieve used David Coode’s sprayer, to spray his recommended weedkiller over the brambles & nettles.  Meanwhile, Roger was replacing the blue rope mark mooring lines, which had worn badly, with polyester line and adding a wooden bowsie to each counterweight line to make shortening easier.  To ease the problem of tangled lines when setting the marks, each now has a bucket to contain the heavy & lighter counterbalance weights, mooring line and buoy.  This has been successfully trialled recently.  The lengths of the longest, yellow C & D buoys is 8 metres, whilst the white 1, 3, 7 & 8 buoys are 7 metres and the red 0 at 4.5 metres. The yellow buoys usually form the start marks where the water is deepest, but recently with the high tide the buoy D’s line was only 7.5 metres and drifted. Hence now with the extra length both C & D lines should be at OK.

In the afternoon the tree cutting operation moved to the west bank where Marcin had an almost impossible task to reach the main branches of the biggest tree.  The structure of the launching platform was under immense pressure as Marcin was operating with both posts and decking at a severe angle, as it was thrown as close to the trees as possible.  It survived and with Marcin using our new waders, he was able to achieve the impossible and remove all the upstanding trunks.  So all the big trees on both banks were cut down, with the exception of just one tree, which was supporting a large moorhen’s nest. Roger’s activities were reduced to taking photographs as the Mountfield 5 in 1 motor would not start and would not allow him to do the hedge cutting.  See the separate page for this and below are the BEFORE & AFTER images of the offending trees.  It looks amazing clear!