No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Finally!  After a morning meeting with our Ranger Dave, we headed out for a full day of our favorite job here at J. Strom Thurmond COE…Pin Hunting.

We have a special bag we carry with all the tools we need to find the elusive boundary line pins, a hand rake, a garden trowel, rags, rolls of pink marking tape, a wire brush and tissues.  Tissues, you ask?  Use your imagination, sometimes when you’re deep in the woods and nature calls…

It was a gorgeous day, warm and sunny.  We set off to tackle the boundary lines around a couple of yacht clubs on Thurmond Lake.  We took with us fellow volunteer Laura, who wanted to learn how to pin hunt.  It was great to have her along, she picked up the technique very quickly and was a great help to us.  We wish we had someone to teach us when we headed out on our first pin hunt.

On that first pin hunt, we were sent out to an area and spent several frustrating hours looking for pins along the side of the road, never finding any.  When we returned, very frustrated and reported our lack of results, we were told that they don’t worry too much about roadside pins, because the are usually destroyed by the large tractors that cut the grass.  Besides, no one in their right mind would build from the road onto Corps property.

But we stuck to it, learned by doing and got addicted to the hunt.

With Laura along yesterday, we were able to cover more ground and find and mark the pins faster.  We were glad that she was along because she was quite the “Eagle Eye” and spotted tree markings and even some pins before we did.  :c)

Part of one area took us into some very deep woods.  Because it was such a warm day, I shed my long sleeve shirt and worked in a t-shirt.  Big mistake.

We completed one entire area around one yacht club, finding several encroachments onto Corps property.  We moved on to the next area, which was much larger and competed half of the area which we’ll complete later in the week.

We were quite pleased with the work we got done when we called it a day.  The shower in the Journey never felt better.

This morning, I got the reward for our hard work.  I woke up with a poison ivy  rash on both of my forearms.  I haven’t had any since I was a little boy and am not too pleased to have a new bout of it.  I’m being careful, trying not to scratch.  I have some anti-itch cream handy in case it gets too bad.  I know, I know, Leaves of three-let them be.  But I didn’t see any of that sneaky foliage.

Just goes to prove one of two things:  No good deed goes unpunished, or I’m not as smart as I thought I was by ditching my long sleeve shirt!  ;c)

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