It was a stunning day yesterday and no, you’re not reading a repeat of yesterday’s blog. That’s two days in a row where we’ve had amazingly warm sunshine. It was time for yet another expedition into the unknown – my jungle.
I was down there at 9.30am, just after the UK stock market opened (where nothing much was happening), clippers, chainsaw and various other garden implements at the ready.
My arms are aching like a guy who has done two hundred press-ups with all the cutting I’ve been doing, so yesterday I thought I’d burn some of the bushes I’ve cut down over the last two weeks or so. It would be less tiring – or so I thought.
In a previous blog, I said I don’t usually burn my rubbish but there’s so much of it down there that I’d be forever running to the déchèterie (local tip) to get rid of it, so burning it was. Guy had tried to burn some with me the other day but he’s a fan of Ray Mears (jungle survival expert which is probably appropriate) and after about 30 minutes of trying to light a fire by striking two stones together to get a spark, or rubbing two sticks together, I told him to ‘get his finger out’ and use the lighter!
Anyway, yesterday I took a lighter and some BBQ fluid just in case, but after loading a few dried up bushes on the fire circle, I lit it and whoosh – up it went. No problems there. Several more bushes were loaded on and the fire was getting a bit fierce and starting to spread so I did the flailing branch trick – just beat the flames and out they go.
Just then I heard the unmistakable drone of the Canadair Fire Planes. They’d obviously seen the smoke from the fire observation post at the top of the mountain just behind our house and had called the planes in to investigate. They are based at Mandelieu just outside Cannes and whether or not they had been flying around or had actually taken off from their airfield to see what was on fire, I know not, but they were now ‘buzzing’ me to establish if this was actually a proper forest fire or just some pratt in his garden. After spotting it was the latter they did one more pass, a bit lower this time and headed off back to their base.
Apparently, if you do have an out-of-control fire on your property, they’ll drop hundreds of gallons of orange coloured water on it and then return with a huge bill so I was keen, understandably, to keep the flames in check. Rumour has it that the orange coloured water is so that they can trace the actual land where they dropped it so as to present their bill to its rightful owner!
These Canadair planes are the ones which you sometimes see at the coast dropping onto the surface and skimming over it to ‘suck’ up water, swimmers and windsurfers and anything else on the surface as they pass. Apparently the old apocrophal story about someone finding a dead scuba diver in a tree after a forest fire had been extinguished by these planes, is just that - apocrophal.
We had a fire in the woods just above us a few years back and the pilots are amazing. They fly at the same angle as the mountain, only a couple of hundred feet above the surface and once the water has been dropped, usually with astonishing accuracy, they soar back into the air and off down to the coast again for another load. Picture is of one of the planes picking up water from just off Cannes. You would have thought that there would be too many yachts out there for them to do that - wouldn't you?
We also have fire helicopters out here which hover over swimming pools and suck up the water before flying off to the fire. Imagine turning up, back at home on a hot summer’s day, ready for a plunge into your pool only to find that it’s …… empty!
Still these people are the ones who ‘volunteer’ to lose their water in this way and who pay much less for their rates or water bill so they shouldn’t be too surprised occasionally if their pool is empty. Problem is it can take 2-3 days to refill – a real pain.
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