Early days at the IWA National site

8th, 9th & 10th August

I've missed a day so that the blog is due on the day it's my job to come back to the boat in the late afternoon to do housekeeping.

A quick run down of what we've been up to here at the IWA National site:

On Friday, things got under way with the safety briefing from Dave Jones, the Site and Services Director, aka Site 1 from his radio call sign. Having had the chat we've heard just once or twice before, we got our blue all-areas wristbands and set to.

It was a slowish start, in fact, with various bits and pieces to do whilst we waited for stuff to arrive. In due course the Tardis turned up. The Tardis is the IWA artic trailer full of everything you need to run the Festival, just about. Since the driver bringing it had his own ideas about the best route to where we wanted it on site, it promptly got stuck in a soft patch.

Said driver was also reluctant to admit he had a problem, and tried unhitching the trailer and pulling the tractor forward, whereupon he got really stuck.

Four hours later (yup, four hours) we finally got him out of his hole, recoupled to the trailer and started unrolling the temporary roadway (which had been available all the time) in front of him so that we could get the trailer into position, the tractor uncoupled and get down to work.

The main task was throwing a fence around the Tardis compound, by which time it was knocking off time, and we all retreated to our boats for a drink and dinner.

Yesterday was fencing most of the day, much of it in the pouring rain. It's a long site perimeter, with a fair bit of internal fencing, and because we are amongst a number of housing estates with rather high crime stats, the outer fence is to be double skinned. In total, we have over four kilometres of fence to put up in the course of the next week or so.

By the end of the day, we'd got a double skin round the areas which need protecting right now. Wrg had set up a short weekend camp to assist with this, so we were able to get fed without using the boat facilities, always welcome when working as hard as this in poor weather.

I personally don't especially enjoy barbeques, mind, which is what we had last night, but there you go. It is difficult at this stage of the game to do much creative catering, as most of the stuff we need has not yet arrived.

Today was yet more fencing in the morning, though Sheila went over to the admin side to help with putting up explanatory banners and the like. In the afternoon, I changed team to start working with Bungle and Malcolm on the electrics – the first gensets are here, and by the end of the afternoon we had power to the Tardis, the chippies workshop and brew hut and to the first cabins in the admin compound.

In addition, chunks of temp roadway have been laid, so we are ready for it if the weather deteriorates again. The weekend wrgies have now gone home, and the rump of us are off to a local pub with a high rep for Indian food tonight.