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Good work Rog, Sean. You work till 7, is that normal or were you just trying to get ahead on this one?
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It was important to get as much done as possible on the limbing day to prepare for the crane. The tree had to be topped, and a couple of short logs dropped for the stick to reach over the spar. Ideally, the top would have been dropped on the limbing day.
This was Roger's job. I just came in on the second day to assist with the climbing. This is after Roger and Brian set the climbing lines, rigging lines, and POWs in the tree the previous evening.
Unfortunately, we did not have the aid of the planned chainsaw winch for aiding the climber up the tree, while belayed on an independent climbline, due to a mechanical issue. This reduced production on the limbing day.
Also, the crane could not travel the highway route between something like 6am or 7am until 9am or 10am because of the size of crane, I believe. It came in early. Roger would have to comment on the whole crane end of thing. Noise ordinance meant that noisy operations were only allowed during certain times of the day, so it many not have entered the gated community until 8am, or maybe it was not setting the outrigger, or running the boom until after 8am. The neighbors were not excited about working until 7pm on limbing day.
Brian and I were controlled-speedlining limbs from the bottom of the canopy, starting at about 30-40' for two hours-ish. Brian lowered out and Roger came up. I headed down for a break and lunch at 1230, while Roger continued to work the tree. We were gaining enough height to be able to send all the limbs from around the whole tree to the better primary dropzone where the chipper/ truck was parked on Roger's side of the tree.
We started with two close landing zones. One was a patch of ground between tall rhodies at the tree base, and an even taller rhodie. It went--tree, rhodie, LZ, larger rhodie, chipper--just a scoot around the rhodie with the brush). This closer proximity to the trunk allowed hand tensioning the speedline with a redirect 'biner that added enough friction.
The other LZ was over rhodies at the base and the garage on the secondary side of the tree, down into a paved area that accessed the garage. This had a 3:1 to get the horizontal distance necessary to clear the garage.
After gaining enough height, we were clear for speedlining to the primary side without risking hitting the house or garage with the long limbs (25'+ for the longer ones, maybe 30', but I try not to exaggerate). Roger was able to send them all his way, which is when I went down. This meant only having to drag limbs 10-15' rather than the extra distance from the secondary landing zone, which was probably an extra 50-75'.
As Roger climbed higher, he gained enough height to jump over the taller rhodie to a farther landing zone with a 3:1/ porty combo for tension, and without a control line. Just free sliding them. I headed up around 230-ish until 515-ish, when Roger grabbed some lunch and worked the ground with the crew, and grabbed pictures. I headed down and Roger came back up, working until 7PM.
I think that the plan was to handsaw limbs until 8am on craning day, speedlining them to the LZ, then at 8am, fire up the saw for the remaining work.
