July 18th

Cooler but sunny. Bowled a cut throat game in the men's. won that.into Victoria for more tournament and we won both games, first we had to come from behind.
I am now an official member of the clan Little Society of North America.

I circled around the perimeter of the fire and while some spots were burning vigorously, the lack of wind was a benefit, although I did find the fire was somewhat bigger than I had earlier estimated, as there was a second separate fire approximately the same size as the first; I worked for about a half hour, not making any real progress but temporarily knocking down the larger flare-ups and slowing the spread. During a pause in the chainsaw activity I thought I could hear the D2 so I headed back out. Jerry had made fairly good progress, when I got out to the main road the cat was just a few hundred yards away.

  I turned back and started rolling the log chunks out of the way keeping at it until the ‘cat’ was right behind me.

  I motioned to Jules to stop and I climbed up on one of the tracks, “Most of these trees are too big for your machine.” I shouted. “But keep Jerry with you and you should be able to make some progress. Clear what he cuts first then go back and scrape your guard.” As I started to climb back down I yelled again, “Make sure everything is pushed away from the fire except any logs that have black on them, push them in.”

  This last direction was because operators without fire experience tended to push all the debris into the fire and when corrected would push everything away including wood that may contain live coals.

  I started off ahead of the ‘cat’ and when I caught up to Jerry I said, “Jerry there are actually two fires here, but I want to treat them as one, so I’m going ahead and ribbon out a trail for you to follow, make sure you are far enough ahead of your Dad so you’re not likely to get hit by anything he’s pushing.”

  Climbing over and under the mess of twisted and broken trees while creating a trail that had no kinks or jogs was slow hot work but it was imperative that as the fire spread outward that we left no fingers of windthrow which the fire could follow.

  It took about an hour to go around the perimeter and tie into my starting point. Just as I finished the first pickup truck load of four firefighters George ad picked up in town arrived. They were followed in a few minutes by the remaining six. One of the last passed on the unwelcome news that the last tank truck in town had been sent out of the district to another r fire.