I cast you into the Pit....

The Peanut Butter Pit has always been a massive hit with the kids here at Rocklands, the Jewel in our Initiatives Course Crown you might say..

It's basically a giant rope swing over a pit filled with water which the kids swing across and hopefully land in. Unfortunately though, too many kids were getting across dry and it wasn't quite how we wanted it- the sides were starting to collapse and the edges of the pit were not entirely lined with wood meaning that the water drained away too quickly and with the splashing of the waves from campers belly flopping into the water, the sides were washing away revealing a little too much of the foundations of the A Frame that keeps the whole thing standing. Something needed to be done- Enter Grant and myself, armed with enthusiasm and a chainsaw...

First task was to dig out the pit, (rain water had been washing sand from further up the mountain down into the pit meaning it was getting more and more shallow and less and less scary to swing across) remove the trampoline mats that we had lined the bottom of the pit with (to slow the draining of the water) and dig out the post from the retaining walls. This done we set about digging out the post holes on the mountain side of the PB Pit so that they went deeper making the retaining wall stronger. This was where things got complicated...well not complicated but certainly er BIGGER than we had intended. We figured we could build a retaining wall level with the top platform that the kids swing from. The result would be a wall about chin height (5'+) using the wood from our old high wall (now no longer used).

However, once you have a wall 5' high and then back fill against it with a few cubic meters of sand, it has a propensity to sag a little (I can sympathise). So we needed to anchor it some way. More post holes were dug further up the mountain (about 12' away) in line with our existing posts. Then we put cross beams linking the front posts to the back to the structure strength. however it seemed silly to have all that in place and then just have sand at the top so I floated the idea of making an entire deck for the kids to stand on while they watched their friends get wet. We had the wood, we had the drive and we had a chainsaw so we decided to go for it. More cross beams were added to support the deck. Before we nailed everything together, there was the small matter of finding the 2 tons of sand to back fill the 2.5 cubic metres of void behind our pretty new wall.

We needed help and we were man enough to admit it. Time to call the big guns. Carolyn and Darla set to with a shovel and pick and a walking stick high ho high ho...whilst myself and Shaun wheeled barrows of sand back and forth (Grant was embroiled in another project by this point).

The result was a lovely new parking space up at the Adventure Centre, and the side wall very much reinforced.

After that it was time to nail the deck in place, wrestling the warped boards into submission and beating them into silence with a big hammer. It all looks rather smashing now! But I was not finished! I then cut some poles to size and boxed in the corners at an angle making the pit into a coffin shape ( no significance!), relaid the mats, skimmed over the top with sand and bolstered the downhill sides of the pit effectively back filling onto the new retaining walls

But that wasn't enough for the crazy kids who come to Rocklands, oh no! It was deemed that entirely not enough kids were getting wet, something needed to be done. Our original plan was to run irrigation piping up the A frame of the pit and along the cross beam, punch holes in it and have a cascade of water pouring down on them. Unfortunately this was canned due to the Cape Doctor blowing so hard at Rocklands that all we would really achieve would be to water the plants next to the sports hall. Instead I laid the piping along the underside of the deck (which protruded from the retaining wall slightly) and along the top edges of the other retaining walls, plumbed in a manifold to split the pipe that used to fill up the pit. This means that we can select either to have no water flow, fill the pit, or have the sprinkler system on...its quite impressive when it gets going!