Wednesday - D2P3

It was a fabulous day to be out on the water, but we were not there for the water sports so we headed directly back to the dock at Isla Popa. Mike and I and the two guys from Constructors unloaded the boat. Mike paid them for their services and they headed back out.

Deepwater Harbor Facility at Isla Popa

We now had a big pile of construction material sitting on the dock, about a half a mile away from the work site at el rancho. It was also uphill from the dock to the pavilion, rising about 120 feet (my best guess) and including a flight of irregular uneven stairs.

 I don't have a photo looking up at the stairs, but this is a shot looking down to the dock from the stairs. Just reverse the process in your mind, and you get the picture.

Mike and I started carrying some of the stuff up to el rancho and met up with the rest of the group. They had spent the day dismantling the lower part of the first-flush system and figuring out what had gone wrong. I had expected that this was going to be a rather unwholesome task and whoever excavated and unscrewed the clean-out cap at the end of the PVC pipe was going to be greeted with a blast of fetid, dirty water. My predictions proved wrong; they were able to disconnect the pipes at the elbow. It was in fact full of water, all the way up to the Y-junction at the top of the first flush, but the water was clean. It had not been draining at all; in effect, there had been no effective first flush system for an unknown, but significant, period of time. This meant that it was not a simple clean out problem, but that our original design was subject to malfunction under field  (I really do mean "field") conditions. For us, it meant back to the drawing board.

At any rate, for the next several hours we donkeyed most of the materials from the dock up to el rancho. Chip or Tim had the brilliant idea of using the large rolling duffle as a wagon which allowed us to move the cement and sand from the dock edge over the sidewalk up to the bottom of the staircase. It was hot, sweaty and time consuming, but we took turns and it all got done in a few hours, save for the 30 bags sand. This we got off the dock and left at the base of the stairs. We took a brief lunch break and then headed back to the work site, no one wanting to deal with the pile of sand bags sitting at the foot of the stairs. Just for the record, not only are they heavy, hey are amorphous and very hard to get a good grip on. I really did consider that the way to get it done was to form a bucket brigade with the seven of us and just swing-walk-pass the damn things up the stairs and then haul them up to the site. To my mind, this was just too big a damn waste of our time - things were not going well and we needed to utilize our efforts elsewhere. Coincidentally, as the sand bags had been sitting unattended for a few hours by now, I was approached by a sour looking guy who inquired what we were doing with the sand and I explained it to him. We entered into a brief negotiation and found that the mutually agreeable price of $5 would get the bags hauled to the pavilion. This sounded fair both ends and the deal was done. The money changed hands and Fillipo started hauling the bags up the stairs. I could now devote my energies to better things and headed up to the site.