My drive through to Armadale on Wednesday morning was noteable for the snow lying beside the road and the fields. However none of it had made its way to Armadale, or had already melted when I arrived. More fence fixing and tidying up of posts and wires was needed and after our normal power washing it looked much better. Some of the fence panels had been much battered about in the past few weeks, happily with no serious damage to any of the riders. Other than that is was a reasonably uneventful, if cold, day.
Friday saw a rise in temperature, but there had been heavy overnight rain resulting in the return of the dreaded swamp. Sadly our trusty pump did everything perfectly except for actually starting, so we had to resort to scooping up the water from the large puddle using the bobcat and eventually draining most of the rest with buckets.
They do say that lightning never strikes in the same place twice but I am beginning to wonder. You may recall the cutting of the water pipe when clearing some of the now dried sludge from the area behind the fourth bend fence - well about three feet away from the previous break, guess what? Yes, while tidying up the area with the bobcat a small leak was spotted. Again it was relatively easily fixed but we have no intention of going for the hat trick.
Our main news item was, of course, the acquisition of a field at South Couston, about a mile north-east of our present location for a new stadium with track and also a smaller training track. This is very dependant on Sainsburys obtaining planning consent for the stadium site, which is due to be decided on 26th May.
Friday's meeting against King's Lynn was a bit of a misfortune mainly due to first bend offs for the Fish and Andrew Tully early on which left us with too much ground to recover, although we did level the scores at one stage, the Stars finished more strongly and pinched all four points, rather disappointing after our midweek away win at Birmingham. Our main men were Kevin Wolbert and a much improved Joszef Tabaka, while Kozza Smith, guest William Lawson and Kevin Doolan did the necessary for the Stars.
