August 24, 2011

View of the day-Al checks out the waterway to see if it is safe to cross.

We got an early start, Al wanted AIS at 10:30am and we were only 5 minutes late getting started. Justin was taking last nights load into the elevator so Marilyn was on her own for the first while…which made for some interesting cutting.

This field has also been called the “Land of 1000 Lakes”...there are a lot of potholes and this wet season has filled ALL of them. Marilyn was slowly working her way around all that she could, getting further and further south, away from the trucks and not getting to cut any big patches. Justin got back with the semi and started combining a patch on the east side of the first ravine, it was a lot drier there so he got some pieces patched out for Marilyn to cut before he took off with the next loaded semi.

It was working so much better on this side and Marilyn was getting lots of ground covered with hardly any soft spots…until she started cutting around one of the potholes. She made a point of cutting around 15 feet away from the pothole, when all of a sudden the right front wheel just dropped…about 4 feet down.

It didn’t look good. Al went over and got Big Red and tried to give the combine a tug…after all, there was only one wheel down and the other three were on solid ground…no luck, it just spun down even further. The combine tire had almost disappeared and we could see the reason was the oozing clay that was sucking it even deeper as the tire spun…time for another plan.

Danny made a call to bring in a trackhoe and after an hour’s wait, Nick showed up with rig. He was a master at the levers and was able to get a lot of the mud dug out from beside and behind the big wheel. We tried again with Big Red…the combine tire just spun deeper and by now the back rear left wheel was completely off the ground and able to spin freely. Time for another plan.

Nick took the trackhoe over to the rock pile and brought over a couple of bucket fulls to put in the hole behind the tire to give it some traction and just to be sure we would have a solid pull, Danny called in the big gun…a 4 wheel drive JD with triples.

We watched Justin continue combining and after a short wait for the JD, we got the tow strap hooked up and gave it a slow steady pull…and this time it had enough traction to get the combine out and pulled back onto solid ground.

By now the sun had gone down and there was no way Marilyn was going to attempt combining in the dark, so we drove back over to the other side of the field to park for the night. We stopped in the bar for supper and the first thing we heard from the crowd was “we already saw the pictures”…Al was ready to accuse Marilyn of uploading to Facebook, like she did the last time, but she was innocent this time…it was the guys in the JD rescue rig.

Marilyn was saving the pictures for the blog…