It’s snowing here at Camp Dixie. So many think of ‘Camp Dixie’ and ‘Summer’ as synonymous, but in Winter, Dixie can be a very different place. In Summer the hills echo with the sounds of children, today snow muffles all sound. Two words describe today, quiet and cold. Don’t worry, we have a fire in the fireplace and we spent the day getting boring work done on the computer. Meanwhile, outside the trees are traced in snow as great white flakes fall silently to the ground.
It may have been Thanksgiving but we at camp weren’t just sitting around enjoying the day (Well, not all day). While Rhonda and Nicola were fixing a wonderful Thanksgiving lunch, Rhonda’s brother Tony and I made a quick escape and went down to the dam to start draining the lake. The dam has an upper and a lower gate, so we started with the upper gate, opening it a little bit at a time. The upper gate is easiest, you simply turn the wheel.
After lunch we all went down to Mud Turtle and could already see significant progress. Rhonda brought her fishing pole and tried to see if she could catch any fish. Tony kept telling her that he didn’t believe there were any fish in the lake, but Rhonda tried anyway. No luck this time, but I’m sure she’ll try again after we fill the lake back up in the spring.
On Sunday Rhonda and I went down and opened the lower gate on the dam. The lower gate is a bit harder than the top one. You need to haul the gate up by a chain, and it’s heavy. Still, we opened the lower gate without a problem. The lake will stay drained until probably early spring, when it will have dried out enough for us to walk on it to thin out the brush along the bank.
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