A New Volunteer

Volunteers here at J. Strom Thurmond COE come in all shapes and sizes and we got a special little one.  Our grandson Owie (Owen) came to stay with us for a few days while his big brother Andrew is recuperating from a successful tonsillectomy.

We gave him the grand tour of the things we do here.  We went to a Christmas Party luncheon at the Thurmond Dam Power Plant.

Owie was fascinated by the big generators inside the Thurmond Dam.

He enjoyed the food, especially, his favorite, Black Olives.

On Wednesday nights, we get together with some of the other volunteers at the Rec Hall and play cards.  Owie learned a new card game called Golf,

and he smoked us all!

Today, we took Owie out in the field with us, we did some more property line inspections and pin hunting.  Owie was given the proper attire to wear.

He learned how to use the metal detector.

Some of the pins were buried so he had to dig them out.

The buried pins are usually very dirty and it is hard to read the serial number on it, so we use a brush to clean it off.

On some pins, they are so dirt encrusted we have to use a wet rag to wipe off the dirt.

Once the pin is cleaned off and the number recorded on the map, a pink ribbon is tied around the pin to ease locating it in the future.

Owie learned to read the map, Mimi Marti had fun teaching him map reading.

We found a few properties that had encroached onto COE land.  If you look just over the bird bath, you can see Owie off in the distance standing next to a boundary line marker, just to his left (click on the picture to enlarge).  I took this picture looking down the boundary and this homeowner had built a deck over the line and a large fish pond.  The COE will be contacting this homeowner to get the deck cut back and the fish pond removed. 

Other homeowners kept their decks on the right side of the line…just!

We enjoyed having Owie along, with his help, we were able to complete another large section of COE property lines and verified the location of over two dozen survey pins.

And Marti was really pleased because she didn’t fall into any ditches, this time…

But it’s not all work.  We had to feed this little bundle of energy.  Pizza for lunch was the way to go.

The rangers were very pleased with Owie’s work and awarded him his Junior Ranger Badge.

He’s one happy guy proudly wearing his badge .

He had one question for us.  After six hours of tramping all around in the woods, he wanted to know:  “Why are we stopping so early?”

Thanks for visiting and feel free to leave a comment.