Towards the end of last season, and in an attempt to add a little freshness to the mix, I started to record some Video blogs. The video blog for this Blunsdon Blog edition can be found at the end of this entry. Click on the picture to view the You Tube video.
Perhaps this day should have been called "After the Lord Mayor's Show" because we were all still ruing the defeat by Wolves just three days before and somehow a final match of the season not featuring the main Swindon team didn't feel right. We were also aware that it was not just the end of the season ,it was the final match of the decade at Blunsdon, a decade that had seen Swindon move up from the Premier League and enjoy a number of seasons near the top of the Elite League without actually winning it.
The meeting that we were preparing for was a Swindon Sprockets against an "American Dream Team" fixture. Don't get me wrong - we were determined to get the meeting on if only because it would give the American team, more used to very small tracks back home, a chance to enjoy the enormous Blunsdon track. Indeed, as darkness befell us after the Wolves match I heard two voices discussing the Swindon track in very American accents.
Voice 1: My God, it's a big track.
Voice 2: I swear the track on the centre green is bigger than our home track. This place is awesome.
At the end of a successful tour of UK tracks, the young American team deserved to have a go around Blunsdon and the useful looking Sprockets septet would be good opposition.
All seemed reasonably well early on. The track had been re-graded immediately after the Monday meeting and everything looked well. We had packed down the surface very hard in case of rain but still had to carry out an early morning watering.
But by the time that I had finished putting up the air fence and pinning it all in place a fine mist had descended from the very low clouds that sidled in. It was that fine mist that always gets you wetter than you imagine. Instead of running off the track it just settled like a film on the surface. Fortunate that the track was as hard as concrete, none penetrated in, otherwise we would have had a call off before lunch time.
But as the morning wound on the mist and drizzle continued. We decided to keep all the equipment off the track to maintain that crusted surface and keep out the rain but it did look as very gloomy sight as I wandered around clearing passageways to the main drain.
The pits were clear of al the shale from Monday and there was little else to do than repair and replace some damaged kickboards, in particular one near the starting gate that had split and had attracted the eye of Monday night's referee.
Water was beginning to run off the greyhound track and across the shale to the white line. The puddling on gate four now became an issue - the excess water had to be removed by brush.
Lunch time found us huddled, damp and despondent in number 96 waiting for the inevitable cancellation.
The news that the referee had agreed to the cancellation of the meeting came at 2 o'clock.
Shortly after the transporter came to take back our hired tractor - the season was over.
Punch started work on the ripper, adjusting the blades while I went out and took a wistful look at the old air fence. I had been told by a number of well placed sources that the fence was to be replaced and that it would soon be making its way across the sea to a German track.
I had to admit that I was a tad sad to see it go, but just a tad. Beginning to show its age, it had become increasingly difficult to maintain it to the standards that we liked at Swindon. Stitching was rotting and there were places where the patches had been patched!
And so we took down the blue catch netting and Roy Hicks started to unpin the 100 or so metal pins that fix the air fence to the wire safety fence behind it.
Since the drizzle had largely subsided Ron and Punch decided that it was an ideal time to do some serious track re grading.
Out came the ripper and we ripped deeply into the very hard surface before bringing out the large blade (more of which can be seen in the video blog below) to start to draw back some of the shale that is inevitably drawn from the turns onto the straights during the course of a long and hard season.
With the weather like this we had the perfect conditions to grade - the shale was just sufficiently wet to fold over and cut - too dry and it would have cracked and turned to dust, too wet and it would have turned to slush. Now it was perfect.
Soaking wet from our day in the mists and drizzle at Blunsdon, we packed everything away and made our way back to Number 96 for our traditional toast to the passing year with whisky given to us by Alan Tarrant. We, we would have had not some oik stolen it! But the coffee was hot and the company good. There was a real "end of term" feel about the affair - it was time to go home but no one could summon up the energy or desire to do so.
Click on the arrow below to run the accompanying Video Blog.
Have a very good New Year. The next Blog, sometime next week, will feature our work between November and Christmas and the opening of the Bistro at Number 96!
