Thursday we had a great opportunity to go out to Harold Crane and do a phrag management burn. Phragmite is awful stuff. It overtakes the water and spreads like crazy. The idea is to spray it and then come in a year or two later, drop the water down and burn it. Then the next day or two flood it with water so it chokes it out and doesn't allow as much of it to grow back. We were out on Harold Crane where we spend a lot of time duck hunting. Phrag management is a great thing for duck hunters! We combined hunting conservation and fire fighting all in one day :)
Its really hard to get a prescribed burn to go. You have to have all the air clearances, have the right winds and temps to be allowed to do it and have the right weather forecast for the day. Thankfully we had pretty decent windows and a short amount of time to get it done.
We all meet at Harold Crane boat launch at 8am. The DNR guys were our air boat drivers. Their two bosses came out for the briefing and hoping to see some fire before their meetings.
We had our morning briefing and took some weather. It wasnt quite where we needed it to be so we worked on getting everything set up and trying to kill a little time hoping the humidity would drop.
Dusty, Spencer, Morgan and I ran around to the far south side down the dike that separates the two bodies of land. We had to build a fire line to stop anything from going to the south JUST IN CASE
We took the ranger down the canal road and all those black specs you see out the window are ducks and geese! The place was FILLED with them.
We drafted and lit a small burn to create a line.
My job was to create a wet line and soak anything close that might catch
Thankfully it was still pretty green and didnt want to burn.
While we were doing that the guys were a ways away doing a test burn.
The BIG cloud is out far away at a private b urn and you can see our little smoke cloud from the test burn next to it.
Test burning to see the winds and how the fuels react before we light a BIG fire
From there next we went to the far west end where they had matted down phrag and did a control burn for a fire line. This stuff took off pretty good. Phrag burns really hot and really fast normally.
Chris lighting some fire
Me supervising haha
We only needed to burn the east side of the road to stop the fire from crossing to the west if our burn went really really good.
Dan lighting
Dusty
Chris
TJ, Colton (with DNR) Dusty and Chris
Little Hubby/Wife selfie
Tj and Spencer
Once that was done I was paired off with Jason (DNR) and we went out in the airboat to light the east side. There was one other airboat with Colton (DNR) and Morgan lighting the west end. We were hoping for a strong burn that would tie together in the middle.
We started out with fuzees and fire ignition pistols.
The flare guns are so much fun to shoot off the boat
My driver for the day
We were able to get a decent line by shooting a bunch of flares and throwing a bunch of fuzees but it wasnt taking off like we needed it to. So we ran to shore and got a drip torch to try and get a little more fire on the ground.
This is a shot of my boat for the day and the fires I just lit.
West end crew working on some fire and the road crew (that Chris was on) lighting along the road.
Even with the drip torch we were having a hard time. Our boat didnt have polymer on the bottom so we weren't able to get as close to the weeds as needed. If we were getting in close on some stuff the push of the airboat getting us out was putting out some of the fire. We only had so many flare rounds and fuzees. We eventually had to pick pockets of land to pull up next to. Jason hopped out of the boat (he was in muck boots and I was in wildland boots..) and lit some fires from the ground.
The other crew was having to get out on foot too and hike through the marsh to light their fires.
We didnt get quite as good of a burn as we were hoping. We had some spots that it just wouldnt spread at all. So our airboat came back in. They switched out the crew in the second airboat and went back out.
Colton drove, Chris, Spencer and Morgan lit fires.
They lit for about 2 hours and then came back in for the day.
We got a decent burn. Hopefully this duck season it will be great!
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