Dam desilting........

This post was planned about 6 weeks ago but I never got the pics together in a post.....

 Ordinarily where the ute and people are there is water.....................but when you don't get any rain that runs water into the dams for 20 months they dry up..............

one of the rare upside of a drought is you get to clean out dams.........

lots of finer dirt particles gradually fill up the dam and it is called silt..............you can "desilt" your dams when they get down to increase the water capacity once again...

If only I had some heavy earth moving equipment I would be making this dam much bigger by taking out the wall between the 2 sections of the dam................the hole on the left is a spot we got some dug out of back in 2002/03 drought..........ran out of money and then it rained so we never got the job finished........now I don't have the spare money to get the job finished.......anyway Mr Chooky and FIL had desilted the hole on the left last week..........so then Mr Chooky decided to pump what little amount of water that was left on the right into the left hole so they could desilt the right dam hole.............

the pump only rain for an hour or so and all the water was moved............. 

A few days later Mr Chooky and a neighbour desilted the dam..............I got home from work and went to see how they were going......they needed my help on the UHF radio so I was parked in the dam telling them where to move the scoop to to get the mud.......hence being able to snap these pics......................

 See in the pic below about the middle there is a little bit of dust and a speck which is the tractor................the boys have long wire ropes and chains hooked onto each tractor on either side off the dam........in this case neither of the boys could see into the dam...

They drag the scoop thru the dam and it fills with mud........... 

It gets dragged up to just over the edge of the dam bank and then silt spills out down the bank............

a huge pile here.........and there is a big hole under all this.......... 

they finished as the sun set...... 

for a few weeks after this you need to check the silt pile to see if any stock gets stuck in it............sometimes we fence it off but this year we haven't been doing that......not enough time....

Luckily we only got one sheep stuck in the silt............see how far she had got thru it then pretty much got stuck in the middle..............

The silt looks like it is dry on the top but this stuff can stay wet underneath for a very long time................ 

I was not volunteering to get this sheep out..........Mr Chooky had to go to the rescue...........

he hooked a rope onto her and I dragged her out with the ute..........up she got and ran away...........Mr Chooky was still trying to walk back out of the mud................LOL.............

 Anyone for a mud mask.................

Anyway that is desilting.............we have done a lot of our dams..........still more to do.........others they have "rung" which is just cleaning up the edges of the dam with the scoop................going all the way around..........

Sadly the dams above are completely empty now............adding to the growing list.............the stock do have a trough to drink from though........ but it adds another job as you have to check it  everyday or two...........

.........take care til next time.....Chookyblue.........