The worst night’s sleep I can remember, and it is entirely my fault. We went back to the car park in Penha Garcia where the football pitch was. Well, the young French lads were a total nuisance playing football and music outside until 4.00am, and I have vowed not to return.
I am determined not to let that get to me. Today, we are going up to the land to measure the three wells and how much water might still be in them right now in the height of the summer heat. We have got to the land relatively early, and it is just beautiful. It is incredibly hot and the daytime temperature in the sun has been in the low forties (that’s 106 degrees to our US friends) for a couple of days.
Today’s challenge is to understand the water capacity on CasaBo. We know that the first things that we will want to address when we own the land are good access onto the land, water, power, a cover to provide shade from the sun and shelter in the rainy season for TUT (maybe a marquee or a lean to), and a level piece of ground.
Starting with better access, we took the baby step to contact somebody local who really understands civil engineering and running a farm and arrange to meet him on Tuesday. Big tick on that baby step. Before he arrives, we want to understand how much water is in each well. This is quite amusing for me as it is the real-life implementation of something I remembered I learned at school. The volume of a cylinder is pi multiplied by the radius squared multiplied by the depth. My keyboard skills do not stretch to being able to type the relevant characters.
Our life skills do, however, allow us to make a net out of the fishnet and string that was bought at the China Shop, fill it with a couple of rocks, and lower it to the bottom of the well to get a total depth. Then measure the depth to the surface of the water. Work out the calculations. Take the second from the first, and the rest is the amount of the elixir of life in each well.
We repeat this exercise on all three wells, and find out to our surprise, that the total water available right now is a little over 56,000 litres. We will do a measure again next week which will give us some idea of how much the water level has changed in the heatwave. Water is going to be pretty crucial going forwards and we know very little about the subject. We do know we have a total water capacity of over 130,000 litres.
We go into the closest town Idanha-a-Nova for a few supplies and on our way out I take the wrong route, not once but twice! Wouldn’t you just know it, but we end up at a public car park by a football pitch (you know how much I love those at 2am in the morning) in a little village called Oledo. The difference with this one is that the grass is a foot high all over the football pitch, so I don’t think we will have any noisy neighbours tonight. Just gotta love it when you complain to the Universe and the reply shows you its great sense of humour!