We woke up Saturday to a brisk northerly, the same sort that tore loose and sunk a bunch of boats here last fall. There must have been some fishing opening in the waters south of us, though, because as the sun rose a parade of sports fisherman pounded their way south through the cut against the current, even though the ebb meeting the wind just off Indian Island was creating some roller-coast rapids they had to negotiate. One sailboat upped anchor and headed south as well, a wise move even though he had a rough passage under sail.
We had imagined that most of the boats left in the anchorage here had been pretty well tested over the course of the winter but I happened to glance over at the marina mid-morning to see that one of the victims from the Thanksgiving storm last year had broken loose again and had somehow been swept around the marina onto the mudflats nearby. That might have been lucky; in November, she had been pinned against the marina breakwater, dismasted, and had big chunks ripped out of the hull as she pounded into the concrete. This time, she just drifted in until her keel hung up in the mud. Fortunately, Vessel Assist Port Hadlock was right there... they literally just backed out of their slip and got a line on her. It only took about five minutes but it was a rough five minutes. I got a couple of videos; this one shows the un-grounding and a bit of low comedy as the hand on the sailboat takes a tumble when the line goes taut:
The others are on my YouTube page. That was Saturday; Sunday, I took on a hang-up of a different nature. A tree had come down above the guest house garage driveway and hung up in another, leaning at about a forty-five degree angle. It effectively blocked the driveway, which wasn't a huge deal because the only thing in there is the lawnmower. That won't be needed for a couple months. More worrying was the fact that it was very close to hitting yet another tree, one which is already leaning toward the guest house itself. Although that one seems pretty solid, my concern was that in a southerly, if the hang-up un-hung it could smash into the other one with quite a bit of force and potentially bring it down on the guest house itself.
Our friends Matt and Lindsay were up for the weekend, and my first thought was to see if we could just pull the hang-up down on the side opposite the guest house. Complicating matters further, the main propane tank lies in that direction... but there was enough room to bring it down safely, at least, if we didn't yank too hard. We rigged a cable loop around the lower third of the trunk through a notch formed by a branch, and hooked it up to Matt's Suburban and gave her the gas.
It turned out that it didn't matter how hard we yanked, it just didn't want to come down in that direction. In fact, it was much more inclined to roll back toward the tree leaning toward the guest house. So, we left it hooked to the Suburban as an anchor and broke out the chainsaw.
I had a mounting sense of dread as I got the saw from the shop. I have always had a hell of a time getting this chainsaw started. It seems like I have to yank on the cord for an hour before the thing will fire up, and during all that pulling, there is never any sign of encouragement; never a cough, choke, or splutter to suggest that we are making some headway towards operating. I never know which time it's going to be that it just doesn't start at all. As I whaled away at it with an audience of my wife, friends, and their two children, I felt myself growing warm from more than just the exertion as it failed to start. Making matters worse, anytime Mr. Graebel breaks out the saw, he seems to get it going in a couple of swift yanks, just like in the movies. My audience eventually grew bored and cold and disappeared.
Eventually, it dawned on me that when I see Mr. Graebel using the saw, it's always when he is here, in the summer when it is warm, and when I am trying to start it, it's always during the winter when it is cold. I took it inside and left it on the warm floor for an hour, and then took it back out again and it fired up in a couple of pulls.
Although I thought I was in business, it was quickly apparent that I was not. I got the first cut in, but it was slow going and when I went to finish the notch I mostly got just scorched wood... the chain was too far gone. I shut it down and cast about the shop for a spare chain, which I was sure Mr. Graebel would have around somewhere. No luck. By then it was dark and the whole saga was heading into day two.
The next day Matt and I went out first thing and got another chain for the saw. The plan was to cut the tree off at the base, notched to fall away from the guest house, and hoping that some combination of pulling with the Suburban and the weight of the trunk dropping free of the stump would shake the top loose. As I started cutting again, I could see a hundred reasons that wasn't going to work out as planned, but I kept cutting anyway. With the pressure at the top keeping it pressed down against the trunk, it didn't want to just drop free, so I had to cut almost all the way through, at which point of course it slipped down and bound up the saw. With a combination of pulling, shaking, and sawing, I got the blade loose and the base of the tree dropped down to the ground. Where it stayed. Nothing came loose, except that it all showed an even greater inclination to come down toward the guest house.
Matt and I decided to try to pull the base around, using the stuck top as a pivot point. The base was pretty well stuck, though, and Matt couldn't get good traction, and we resorted to more and more dramatic steps to yank it loose, until we had bent the gate on a slip hook, and finally the clamps at one end of the cable came loose and sent the thimble flying and the cable running free. This reminded us of a bit of folksy wisdom that the renter in the guest house had passed along the day before, which was something like "Don't saddle a dead horse upside down," by which he meant that the clamps should be installed with the U-bolt toward the shorter, working end and the "saddles" along the standing part of the cable. The one we were using was backward from that. I figured it was Mr. Graebel's cable, he had probably put it together the way he wanted it, so I left it alone, but it turned out old Bill was on to something there.
But that pretty much finished us up for the day, because the tree wasn't budging anyway. I lashed it up to another tree on the uphill side to help keep it from coming down toward the guest house and went inside to look for alternatives. Oh, and found the spare chain when I went to put the chainsaw away, of course... I had knocked it back behind something when I was getting the saw out in the first place, apparently.
Most of what I found was a lot of advice not to mess with hung up trees, suggesting that those more than any other result in injury and fatalities among sawyers. The most practical advice was from wildland firefighters, who sometimes simply have to drop them: they said pull it down or use a bulldozer or some dynamite. There was one technique that looked promising, called a step-cut:
That was basically what I had done with my first cut, except that instead of the tree just dropping free after I made the back cut, it just pinned the blade in between the trunk and the stump. I don't know if it was because of the angle or just the fact that my tree was a lot bigger and heavier. With the little I could find about the technique, the suggestion seemed to be that it was best used only on trees under 10" in diameter, where mine was more than a foot.
While I was looking, I came across another entertaining video of how not to deal with a hang-up:
There were some other suggestions, but they pretty much all revolved around smaller trees: rolling it, twisting it, etc, etc, just weren't realistic options with something this size.
So, anyway, I finally admitted defeat and called up Mr. Graebel for the name of his tree guy. I'll be interesting to see what he ends up doing with it.
