As I alluded to previously, we had to figure out a way to get 2 mangled boat lifts out of the water. The weather was nice that day, but the water was still pretty choppy, making the process much more difficult.
Throughout the clean up process, I’ve come to believe that bigger is better. Ex: Get the biggest chainsaw you can find. Or, if it’s too big to cut up with a chainsaw, just drag it with the truck. For the boat ramp we could have really used a tractor or front-end-loader, or something similar. That way we could just drag the whole thing out from the muddy water and disassemble on dry land. Unfortunately, all we had was a cheap ratchet set, lots of rope, and a sledgehammer(just in case).
Other than that we worked from Sun Up to Sun down for 3 days….and then some in the dark too.
The straw debris is much thicker than it looks in the picture. It’s about 12 inches deep, about the thickness of a pencil, and still kind of water logged, so your standard garden rake won’t cut it. We ended up renting a tractor with a big bucket on the end of it. Next time(and there’s always a next time), we’ll try and get a bucket that clamps down. Anyway, we ended up filling up the trailer with this stuff about 30 times to be hauled off and eventually burned.
We still have a lot to do, but we got the bulk of it cleaned up without too many snags. It’s like they say, How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time!
Thanks for reading!
–Jeff
