Sand Point Saga

Dear Campers,

This year for Independents Day we decided to drive our own sand point well here at camp.  After 33 days and many lessons learned we now have free water!  Why run a point you may ask?  Answer: the chemicals silly.  Why water your garden with fluoride and chlorine?

As you can see we hit sand and gravel 2.5 feet down.  You would think that this would make for easy pounding, but their was nothing easy about driving this sand point.  The post pounder that we had borrowed had a broken handle on one side and after awhile the other handle came loose.  Lesson one:  you can borrow or rent for cheap a heavy duty reinforced post pounder from most hardware stores.  If I would have known this, I would have still been able to write my name for a few days after pounding.  This brings us to lesson two:  find some friends and neighbors to help you drive the well.  We were fortunate to have help from our neighbors on this project, but let me tell you the MORE THE MERRIER!

So at the end of the first day our pipe had started to slant to one side because we had hit a rock, but after discovering water at 14 feet, I was still hopeful that everything would work out.  The next morning I pounded a few more feet until the pipe broke about 8 feet down!  Lesson three:  shop around for your well supplies cause this shit ain’t cheep!   We were hell bent on driving this point for the 4th of July so I had just picked everything up at one place.  Now that I had to do it all again I found out that the farm supply stores are a good place to find the cheapest point, but you want to buy your pipe at a hardware store that threads pipe. So rather than dowsing to find the “easiest” place for my next attempt, I just moved a few feet over and started the pounding process again.  This time I hit water at 14 feet, but had read ONLINE that you want to drive the well until the pipe will stay filled with water when you pour down it.  This caused me to drive down to 21 feet, but when I tried the pump, it had pressure but no water came out.  Lesson 4 & 5:  it’s best to find someone who has lived through a few sagas and for me this person was the guy at the pipe threading hardware store.  He informed me that no you don’t need the pipe to stay filled with water and that I had likely drove the well too deep!  So next the neighbors and I tried to exhume this dead well with a bumper jack which was no easy task for us or the jack, so finally the jack gave up and broke.  This lead to asking for help from a different neighbor who has a few large toys to play with and I’m glad I did because the well was so stuck in the clay that the back tires of the front end loader started to come off the ground and then finally the point resurfaced.

So when I went to the threading store to pickup the pounder for the 4th time, I asked if I could drive down the same hole as before and the answer was yes.  A few hours later I was taking one of the coldest/best feeling showers of my life!  At first the water was pretty silty, but after pumping for awhile it started to clean up.  The water tastes great, just like old fashioned farm water, but I do plan to send it in to be tested before sharing it with anyone.  A good sign is that Smokey the dog likes it.  The best part is now the produce from our garden will be chemical free.  If you are still living in the fluoride fog, I recommend checking this site out:  http://www.fluoridealert.org/

It is time we ended this forced flawed experiment!

Much love,

US