Missouri Monday- An Awesome Day to FORGET!!!

5 am monday morning and we are completely loaded and ready to hit the road for Shelbina, Missouri. We were headed to Dan Bollow's newly acquired farm to install a Vertex Air 4 aeration system. Apparently the previous owner of the beautiful 3 acre pond failed to mention that the pond gets completely covered with watermeal every summer. Anyhow Dan did his research and basically put together a complete management plan for ridding his little slice of heaven of the dreaded floating green sand! He found us online and we were up for the task for helping him implement his plan for eliminating the watermeal.

Anyhow we were on the road heading towards Shelbina for oh about 5 minutes when our fish holding tank got picked up by the 35 mph wind gusts and thrown from our boat out onto the interstate. What a great way to get the morning started.

We were lucky the tank didnt hit any cars traveling along I74, but unfortunately the tank wasnt so lucky when a Semi plowed into the tank sending it flying into the middle grass buffer! The semi just kept on trucking.



So we very narrowly averted a potential disaster when we realized that our electrofishing annode arrays were supposedly in the tank! We spent a few minutes searching up and down the interstate with the aid of a state trooper and his spotlight who was so kindly called by an anonymous traveler who happened to see a big fish tank on the interstate at 5 am (apparently just seconds before the semi came by) and low and behold did find most all of the pieces of our $2000 annodes!





The good news is we found most of the pieces, the bad news was we found them a bit late after many cars and semis had ran over them a few times. We just bought those new annode arrays and only got to use them 3 TIMES!!!!!!

An hour later and we were back on the interstate headed for shelbina. We picked up a good friend from Taylor Missouri and headed over to Dan's and got the aeration system installed by noon. Then we headed over to Taylor to check out some of Jacob and Kent Heimers pond projects:

So about 6 pm and we are on the road headed back to Peoria when a very nice small town cop decides we are traveling just a bit too fast through his town on rt. 24. Let me just say that I was driving like a grandma on a Sunday afternoon and was already past town when I decided to speed up to 43 MPH just a few yards ahead of the 45 mph sign. Just a great way to cap off the day eh? He didnt mention anything about the missing left tailight on the trailer, broken license plate, or no seat belts. I think it was just the end of the month and he needed to fill out his ticket quota?

We got home about 9 pm and then up the next day at 5 am and headed for a consultation in Fiatt, IL. Then from Fiatt off straight to the Doctors office to find out whether we were having a boy or a girl. I did not want to find out, Brook did. Anyhow we are at the sonogram, baby looking fine, and Brook decides it is ok for us not to find out the gender.....So the next sonogram isnt for about 12 weeks.