Steady progress on Day 5

After the thrills and spills of the day before, yesterday was a day for a steady effort. It's always the same in the first week; it can be very frustrating not having a great deal to do and knowing that things will be much more hectic as the opening approaches.

Work has gone on preparing the main moorings, and the various cabins continue to turn up. One challenge waiting for the main wrg camp is readying the main car park. Marston's have very kindly donated the use of some spare land of theirs by the canal, but it needs just a touch of sorting out:

The entry doesn't look too bad...

It needs a bit of strimming and so on, that's all. It's when you get inside that the scale of the task becomes apparent:

Heaps of hard core

These two heaps have to be levelled off and spread out over the unpaved areas to make a usable parking area. Mike Sumner, aka site 3, is a professional contractor for this sort of job, as it happens, and estimates about two days work for a Merlo telehandler with a big bucket. We shall see!

Meanwhile, Mo and Martin, aka the Americans, started improving the towpath edge for the moorings, whilst another team on board Shropshire Lass tackled the vegetation on the offside:

The problem

This area has to be cleaned up so that boats can be moored two abreast on the towpath and still leave room for passing craft.

Here comes Mo with a rake

 I'm not sure if I've explained this before. Mo is from Scotland, and she and Martin live in Iver in Bucks. When they turned up at their first National camp, the first person they met misheard Iver as Iowa, and told everyone else that two Americans had arrived. They've been known as the Americans ever since.

Mo using a wheeled strimmer while Martin rakes

On the offside, much more aggressive tactics were called for:

Getting stuck in

There are four blokes in there somewhere.

It just shows what volunteers can achieve with basic tools and some goodwill.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on site:

Some musty hi vis vests were washed and hung out to dry

The Brew Hut cabin was delivered, but with the wrong key, seemingly.

Towing Glenfield

Bob Metcalfe is a stalwart wrgie, but couldn't be with us this week as he has his living to earn. He'd brought his boat, though, and the Waterspace team towed it into its proper mooring, so as not to leave it alone and undefended on the parkside moorings.

Day 4 Boat shuffle

Lots of pictures today, as yesterday's main activity was moving all the workers' boats onto the moorings prepared for them by the Waterspace team. First though, my thanks to Andrew Denny at Waterways World for his great news item about the Festival. Not only does he take much better pictures than I do, he even gives a plug and a link to this blog.

It's nearly enough for me to forgive WW for the mess they made of the moorings at Crick ;).

It's quite an operation, shifting over 40 boats in a pretty narrow channel – I'll let the pictures do the talking:

The first few boats in position

 On a dull, damp morning, operations began just after half seven, with the first boats to be moored on the inside moving up to just by the footbridge.

How the expert does it...

This is Terry Robertson of TR Boat Handling slotting his own boat, Shropshire Lass, into her space. We'd left him just enough room and he didn't touch another boat as he did so. What you'd expect from one of the best boat handling teachers in the business, of course :).

Master class in reversing

This is Pat Campbell reversing Fair Fa' from the parkside moorings to their slot on the workers' moorings. Mind you, it's easier if you have a bow thruster.

Tricky

But by the same token, there's no excuse if you do get stuck! Not that Pat really was here, but I reckon he was sweating a bit.

Sheila Campbell celebrating their safe arrival.

Mind you, if Fair Fa' hits an iceberg this winter, we'll know who to blame.

Ooops

 The "ordinary traffic of the district" (as all those old signs say) continued whilst this was going on, of course. Dave Jones was just starting out with Jacaranda when a Canaltime boat appeared coming in the other direction.

Skilfull hirer

This is another Canaltime; the steerer looked pretty anxious, but was pleased by his round of applause as he emerged from the pack without touching  anyone.

Meantime, work did continue on site, though interrupted by folk being called away to move their boat.

Big gennies

 I said the big gennies would be coming soon, and these are two of them, together with an auxiliary fuel tank. Hopefully, one of these will be positioned in its proper place today, and we shall have a shore power supply to the workers' boats by tonight. We'll be glad of it; the boat behind us has a propane powered Honda genny on his back deck, and it sounds even worse than the petrol ones :(.

Mole plough

 This is the mole plough attachment on one of the mini tractors. It's used to bury water and power cables around the site

Ready for occupation

And finally, a shot of the show field, all marked out and ready for the marquee contractors to arrive.

A damp day 3

It didn't rain with quite the abandon of the day before yesterday, but it still drizzled on and off. It wasn't enough to impede the work, and the ground remains firm and hard; it's been such a dry year, there's a lot of capacity to absorb the rain.

We made several trips to the site; on the first, we heard that there had been some incursions overnight. The fence had been broken in four places, and youngsters careered about, but no damage was done. The fact that there were three German Shepherd Dogs commenting loudly may well have discouraged the intruders from hanging about.

First job for wrg, then, was to re-secure the line, and walk the whole of the fence checking that all the clips were tight. It may become necessary to use anti-lift clips, that tie the panels down to the blocks, as we did at Pendeford a few years back. Siting the Festival in the middle of a town should increase the footfall, obviously, but at the cost of greater security problems. The security firm, Intaguarding, will begin work today, so that should help.

Matters otherwise progressed steadily; the sense is that we're well ahead with the tasks, as it often is at the stage; it's as the opening approaches that the pressure mounts. The Site Director, Dave Hearnden, aka Moose, has arrived, and will be spending a lot of his time walking around, accompanied by two of the aforesaid GSDs.

Plumb Bob's Arch

This is true in several ways, but in this case it was his chosen solution to get the water supply to the far end of the field past the entrance to admin village. There's some discussion about appropriate decoration; fairy lights or a pair of amber beacons?

The Comms team

 Peter and Pat are the comms team, running phone lines around the site. They're very shy, so I haven't shown their faces ;).

Workers' moorings nearly ready

 An awful lot of strimming, scrub clearing and hole filling has been done in two days to make the moorings ready to occupy today.

Plumber in a tree

 Plumb Bob asked me why I take so many pictures of him. He didn't seem entirely convinced by my explanation that the plumbing team works so hard.

Security encampment

The security team from Intaguarding will be living on site for the duration, enabling them to respond to any emergency mob handed.

Unloading a the big genset from the beaver tail.

Wrg has two gensets of its own, this larger one contained in a box trailer, and a small towable. When Bungle went to collect this one, he loaded it onto the beaver tail truck, then opened up the back doors to check all was secure inside before setting off. He was confronted by an enormous wasps nest, about the size of a basketball.

He's a very large bloke, but I'm told only milliseconds passed before he was back on the ground and moving away from the truck.

Later on, the seriously large generators will arrive from the contractor who's doing the main supply to the site.

The real day 2

Thanks to Brian on Harnser who drew my attention to yesterday's deliberate mistake! It's this doing the blog first thing in the morning; not only am I having to remember that I'm talking about the day before, I have to have woken up enough to to cope with the time juggling. Anyway, on with the motley...

It was indeed very wet, yesterday, as forecast, and we were very glad that we could legitimately stay snug in the boat working on the newsletter while it hammered down outside. Talking to folk later in the day, I gathered that it had been too much even for the wrg team, who had postponed starting work until gone ten. (Thanks to Grumpy Nick for the info.)

Thursday's edition is now almost as far as we can get it without the last minute stuff, so yesterday's job was getting Friday's issue into shape. It may seem strange working so far ahead, but with just the two of us to do all the tasks involved in publishing a newsletter, there won't be any time to spare on the actual day of publication.

Last year, we had loads of stuff in advance, because the theme was anniversaries of various sorts, and Sheila had emailed the relevant societies and trusts and got copy out of them. The result was that we arrived at Beale Park with all the issues half made up. This year, much of the copy is going to be self generated, though folk are beginning to send in contributions, so more work is being done on site.

In the afternoon, the rain had more or less stopped, and we were able to get out on site, looking for stories, meeting up with old friends and enemies (mostly the same people) and taking photos.

Plumbing team in conference with Supplies

There are two Bradshaw golf buggy type transports about at the moment, one for the plumbers and one for the chippies. They can tow a trailer, and make so much difference to getting stuff moved around site.

Inside the Tardis

 In effect, it's a mobile quartermaster's stores. John Baylis is the QM; least likely saying "Take as many as you want, we've got plenty!"

The pasty wagon

 So called because it looks like a van that might be selling pasties. In fact, it's an ex-CEGB field vehicle, and is used by Bungle in much its old role, moving large amounts of cabling and connection boxes around for wiring up places like the admin village, the wrg compound and the workers' moorings.

Tardis compound

 The workshop of the Festival, with a fully equipped chippies shop (goes with the pasties, I guess) and storage for materiel.

Who let the dogs out?

Woof, woof! Actually, it's the water supply. With permission, we've tapped into a fire hydrant, and a network of water pipes with radiate out from here to the entire site.

Day 1, good stuff, bad stuff

As readers of my other blog will know, I don't think of Shobnall Fields as a particularly safe overnight mooring in normal circumstances, but we had hoped that the sheer numbers of us about would mean that we needn't worry too much just now. It transpired that this wasn't altogether the case, as at 2 am yesterday morning, one of the boats tied near the footbridge, Jenny Wren, got a huge lump of concrete on its roof, and another which smashed one of their windows.

The police were on the scene quite quickly, as the gang of yobbos responsible had already been attacking parked cars nearby. Jenny Wren's window frame will have to be replaced, as the bottom edge has been buckled by the force of the blow. Needless to say, she's moved to a location further away from the bridge.

The problem is that the footbridge is the walking route from a couple of shall we say down at heel estates on the park side of the canal to the city centre pubs and clubs.

Apart from this unpleasant start, it was a good day yesterday; the sun shone, the wind wasn't too bad, stuff started arriving in the right order, more or less. For example, this site has a couple of water mains and a gas main running under it, so we need to have tracking laid down over them before heavy vehicles can cross.

To everyone's relief, the tracking arrived before the Tardis.

That last sentence needs a bit of explanation to those not familiar with the IWA Festival. The hardware needed to set up and run the show is stored in a big pantechnicon, and kindly looked after for us by Andy Taylor, who runs a transport firm at Barton Turn. It's called the Tardis because you wouldn't believe the amount of stuff there is inside.

Here comes the Tardis, IWA style

First thing out once it's parked up? The step ladder to get inside.
Second thing? The gazebo that serves as the tea shelter for the workers in the Tardis compound, naturally.

The day's work had started a good bit before this, with the obligatory Health and Safety talk. It's one of the more sensible ones: don't do a job you are not sure about, remember the telehandler driver can't see you if you can't see him, a tidy site is a safe site, these are the first aiders, stuff like that. After the talk, we all signed to say we'd had it and were aware of the risk assessments, and were then issued with our "three week worker" wrist bands, which are in effect an access all areas pass.

We were also told a bit of news hot off the press. Because IWA has won the contract to manage the Olympic moorings next year, representing around six weeks work for the volunteers, there won't be a Festival in 2012. The payment for the Olympic work will replace the revenue from the Festival. There will, however, be an event in 2013. It seems to me (and note the disclaimer at the top of this blog) that this gives IWA a chance to take stock and think about the purpose of the Festival. I'll be returning to this theme as the next three weeks go on.

Dave Jones gives the H&S talk

Then the work could start in earnest:

Strimming  the bank where the workers boats will be moored

Starting fencing the show site

The start of the admin compound, and a typical denizen of it

and still the fence grew and grew...

As forecast, it's turned wet today, which is hard luck on the wrgies who will be coming this weekend to help get the majority of the fence up.

Day 0

We left Branston at half eight yesterday, the cunning plan being to arrive at Shobnall Marina just as they opened at nine. This sort of worked; we got there at ten past, only to discover two other blue shirt boats manoeuvring to get under the access bridge. These were Peter on Ehawee, and Dave and Beryl on Peddler.

Peter got in first, and we tied on the rings outside to wait. Peddler drifted about in the winding hole opposite the entrance, with occasional bursts from the bow thruster. We beguiled the time with shouted conversations with Dave and Beryl. Everything took quite a while, as both boats wanted to top up with water as well as getting diesel and/or a pump out, and the tap at Shobnall is quite slow.

By the time it was our turn, another three boats had arrived to join the queue behind us.

Boat juggling at Shobnall

Fully dieseled and pumped out, we came smartly backwards out of the arm, and I was able to swing Sanity Again round to carry on towards the show site without needing to use reverse again. This was a bit of a triumph; all boaters will tell you that such masterpieces of handling normally only occur when there's no one else to see.

There are lots of boats here already, double banked along the parkside moorings and some distance along the towpath. We just tagged on to the end, handily near a cut through into the housing estate, so that Elanor was able to visit us in the late afternoon, on her way to agility with Sally.

Earlier, we'd had a wander round the field, and I took the first shots of the space which over the next two weeks will become a little village within the town:

First arrival at the campsite

The clans gather

Just some of the fencing that will be erected in the next week

Smiling faces at the start, at least...

This is Sandy the administrator: she's got a lot on her mind...

Marking out the show field

Getting ready for next year

We've just about recovered from the excitements of Beale Park, and we're starting to think about next year's event at Shobnall Fields, Burton on Trent. As part of that, I've changed the name of this blog, but not much else will happen here until we get nearer the time.

I'll mention relevant stuff over on my main blog, Living in Sanity Again, from time to time.