A few of you may have seen one of my lads on camera 2 today, on the lake, in a dingy. He was towing around four orange sacks. If you did see it on camera, It wasn’t meant to be quite like that. He was trying to submerge the four sacks that were filled with barley straw. We put it in a a precaution against algae.
The lakes are man made, that we put in about ten years ago. We had a small, very wet field, with the overflow of a leet running through the middle of it, It was an ideal site for lakes and would encourage wildlife, it has worked very well. The idea was to fill the lakes with water from a stream that runs by the side of them, before we had time to put a diversion from the stream into the lake it was half full and filling very quickly from underground springs, there was no need to use the stream as the water source. There is a constant flow from the main lake, that is about an acre in size, to a smaller pond of about a third of an acre.
When the lakes were finished we had a nutrient problem that cause a very large build up of the algae. Trying to clear it by hand is a never ending task. The chemicals released from the barley straw as it rots down, acts as a natural herbicide and kills the algae, a wonder fix really. We had not renewed the straw for a few years and I should think that we may not have a nutrient problem any longer, but it is not worth taking a chance.
Any way back to the boat saga, the idea with the bags of straw, is to put a weight larger than the weight of the straw, to take the bags to the bottom of the lake, unfortunately we got the weight wrong and it was not heavy enough to sink the bags, they would have floated around the lake until the straw got wet and the bags sunk, but they really need to be in a certain place.
My lad was in the middle of the lake with one oar, no rowlock trying to get the dingy, straw and concrete weight back to the bank, but the heavy weight was making it difficult for him to move, he was cursing about needing help and that we needed to throw him a line, so that we could pull him in. I hope there were no lip readers watching. What was not seen on camera was my other lad and myself on the bank, in fits of laughter at the site of him struggling to get back to dry land, so much so, we were unable to help him. Needless to say the job did not get finished and it will have to wait until next week. I didn’t have the heart to tell him he was on camera, will he curse when he finds out.