August 5, 2011

View of the day-Casey dumps into the semi before the bad weather can catch us.

The weather reports for today said 10% chance of rain...but of course, this is the weekend and the second stringers are doing the predicting.

We got out to the field, serviced, fueled and were ready to go as soon as Danny and Casey got out after lunch. There was a heavy dew and the humidity was higher than it had been yesterday, so we figured it would be a bit tough to start...and it was. But we still managed to get the field finished...not without some issues.

Marilyn had been having trouble with the knife stopping and every time it did, the reverser was not strong enough to get the knife cleared. This meant getting out and pulling the straw out by hand...at least 10 times during the day and it didn't matter if she was going slow or through wheat with no weeds...no rhyme or reason. Now, we had talked to the MacDon guys at the support trailer about it when we were in Pierre almost two weeks ago and they said they would call us before they came out to change some settings on the reverser.

While Al was dumping at the bins, he gave them a call...since we were still waiting to hear from them...to see when they could come out. They had moved to Billings, Montana! They certainly don't come close to 'support'...not like the ProHarvest team, that's for damn sure. Al was somewhat miffed and conveyed his feelings to them...and he's not done with them yet.

Al decided to give another harvester a call to see what we could do and he came up with a couple of suggestions that we could try...tighten the drive belt or switch to fine tooth sections. We started with tightening the belt and it didn't stop again, mind you, we didn't cut a lot more after that either.

We moved up to another field and did a test...it was still over 14% moisture, so we continued another 6 miles to the next field and it was plenty dry, so we got started on it. There were now thunderstorm watches popping up and we could see how dark the skies were getting...and they were getting closer all the time, so Casey decided we should pull the pin so we could get the semi tarped before the wind and rain hit.

While Casey was looking after the semi, Marilyn fueled up the combine, then gave Casey a ride home...all the while watching out the rear view mirror as the black clouds were swallowing up what little bit of daylight that was left. By the time she got back to the camper, Al was just getting back from fueling up the General...then the rain hit...and hit hard, thankfully we were settled in for the night.

We won't know how much we got, since the campground mower chewed up our rain gauge...