Bore Success!

BY AYESHA JOY CLIFFORD©

WE hit the water jackpot in a couple of ways this week.

While the Amazing Husband has been Walking For Water (see previous post) we also hit our own water jackpot on The Pretty Farm.

This summer has been dry for the Northern Rivers of New South Wales..

Up to March 17, we had only just passed 100mls of rain for the year to date.

Just for comparison, here are the previous few year's totals for the same time:

• 2013 - 578mls
• 2012 - 428
• 2011 - 507
• 2010 - 368

 Records we have going back to 1905 testify to varying rainfall over the years. This year’s summer rainfall was low by any comparison for this part of the Northern Rivers on data available.  

Thanks to much fencing, a planned grazing regime and the past few wet years, we have good pasture residuals going into winter.

We have been wanting to sink a bore at our place for the past few years and had a site located by a local legend "Snow" last year.

Snow walked all over our place looking for water and I joked to the Amazing Husband that the site would be right in front of our house and guess what?

 BORE SUCCESS: The drillers thought we hit the jackpot with our new bore.

This was the outlook from the office this week: A rain shower coming in from the south-west and water flowing from the drilling rig - not far down!

Now I'm no expert on bores but that's pretty unusual according to the experts. 

"You should buy a Lotto ticket," they joked. We are already winners.

We struck a great flow, looks like lovely water (yet to be officially tested) at less than half the depth we were expecting (and about half the price!). Happy customers but I did feel a tad for the contractors. Ouch! Not to worry – they are busy at the moment.

So on that watery note, we're feeling pretty blessed here on The Pretty Farm.

We had 22.5mls of lovely, gentle soaking rain this week and a "really good" water bore drilled.

Now the “really” fun part: working out who gets to sit on the tractor and who gets to walk behind juggling that giant roll of pipe into the pipe layer to get lovely bore water around to all our paddocks.

The girls are going to be so happy!