Working at the Festival 4

18th August

As I expected, yesterday was a day of tinkering with the fence line. We restructured the enclosures around admin village and the main entrance, and later in the day took a tour around the whole perimeter checking that all was still secure. Some of the stays needed repinning, but otherwise all was well.

The major job in the afternoon was back at problem corner. The site team had decided that there was no way we could get a trombo wagon with a 70 foot narrowboat round it as it stood, and it's on the route to where the land based boats will be craned in.

We'd got permission from the farmer to take down some of his permanent fence (which, to be honest, was a bit agricultural in appearance, being partly composed of pallets and old iron gates, held together with blue polyprop and bailer twine).

He came by just as we were taking a sledge hammer to some of this, and we had some further negotiation, shall we say, about just how much we were going to remove. This was settled entirely amicably, and in due course one of the Merlo telehandlers came along and pulled out some of the posts.

It really underlines the sheer power of one of those beasts when you see that it doesn't even cause the engine note to change as the jib rises, pulling a big post out of the ground like a rotten tooth.

The whole area now looks much better, which is good as it lies behind the IWA marquee site, and will be used for the Cressy Garden (no, I'm not sure, either).

In the evening, Bungle and his team turned up and installed the gennies and lines to supply power to the boats. It looks as if there's been an underestimation of the size needed to for one of the gennies, but we shall see. It appears to have coped overnight, but that's the easy bit.