The day began with a series of surgical strikes by Murphy. The liner arrived in a 12' wide roll wrapped with several layers of underlayment fabric to protect it in shipment. Since the liner is 50' wide, it obviously had been folded in some pattern before it was rolled. With only our excavator Brian (God bless him) and I available to pull the 1200 pound liner over the pond we knew it was going to be a long day if we didn't get the liner positioned so that the folds worked in our favor. After examining the ends of the roll, we had it all figured out and positioned the liner next to the pond accordingly!
The first thing we noticed upon removing the protective layers of fabric was a piece of paper taped to the liner that read "50' x 70'". Due to my excellent short term memory capacity, I had clearly (but mistakenly) remembered ordering a 75' long liner and Brian had dutifully dug the pond to a size that would require all 75'. Oh, well, nothing that an order for an additional 10' x 50' roll of liner can't fix!
This discovery was followed quickly by Brian's observation that a rodent of some sort had crawled into the rolled liner and had busied itself chewing a hole. Apparently the rodent realized that the liner was folded and, therefore, chewed directly into the roll in an effort to cause as much damage as possible. At this point, I was pretty sure that the pond project was well on its way to FUBAR status. Mercifully, the biggest holes ended up being at the edges of the liner and would not be below the final water level. Only two small holes eventually had to be patched using the seaming tape I already had on hand.
Murphy's third stroke was revealed when we unrolled the liner (which was easier than expected) and found that the liner had been folded so that it could be positioned in the center of a pond and pulled outwards to the edges. Despite our careful analysis, we had positioned the liner completely wrong, at the far edge of the pond. The folds that were on top were such that we would have to pull 25' feet (i.e. 600 ponds) of the liner away from the pond before we could get to the folds that could be pulled towards the pond, and then we would have to pull the whole tamale (i.e., 1200 pounds) over the pond. To my great relief, Brian devised a plan whereby we could work back and forth over the length of the liner, pulling just one 5' to 6' width at a time and always in the direction of the pond. Despite a lot of extra walking, we soon got the hang of it and were able to work efficiently. Even with several water breaks, we finished in under three hours.
A couple of other lessons learned were that black rubber in the sunshine gets really hot! Also, wear gloves. In addition to being heavy, the rubber clings very well to stuff and, after working just one section of the liner, the skin on the first knuckles of my fingers had been stripped off leaving raw flesh. I hadn't noticed at first since I mistook the burning sensation as being due to the heat of the sun warmed rubber.
Next comes some water in the deep zone to help us smooth out all the wrinkles in the liner.
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