Shearing

Very busy couple of days. Too tired to do blogging after work and no one is following anyway so doesn't really matter. Friday and Saturday were both 5:30 am get ups for 6:00am starts.  Both days had good tallies of 500 plus.  Molks shore 304 in 8 hours which is probably a record for George Island.  Shore an extra half hour each day and finished at 5:30.  Then had to come home and sort out supper.  Quite organised for the first two evening meals, had them ready prepared.  Saturday night had to come home and cook one but had opted for an easy meal of sausage, chicken drumsticks, chips, veg and gray with a dessert of angel delight and peaches.  Easy enough meal but still not cooked before 7:30 so a late day by the time the dishes and tidying up was done.  At breakfast time Chris leaves the shed quarter of an hour early and comes home and cooks eggs etc, at lunch time he does the same but because we don't have a cook we only have a cold lunch of salad and cold meats and ham.
Sunday morning saw 70 rams and 45 ewes left.  The shearers were booked out on the islander on the first flight which meant they wouldn't get them all finished.  Chris took the ewes out of the shed and put the rams in first as he didn't intend getting left with rams to shear.  We shore 2 hours before breakfast and the shearers finished the rams.  We then had a thirty minute breakfast instead of an hour and went back to the shed until 9:15.  The shearers then came straight home changed their clothes and headed up to the airstrip.  The planes eta was 9:35.  This left it pretty tight as each time you meet the plane you have to clear the grass strip of sheep and geese, put up a wind sock and attach a fire appliance to the vehicle.
After seeing the shearers off we had smoko then went to the shed and Chris shore the 11 ewes that were left.  I carried, swept the floor, rolled and classed the wool.

Shaun working on Barren Island putting a new roof on the Barren Island shearing shed

Shearing finished we marked 19 lambs that had been missed at lamb marking time.  I pulled them out and we marked them on the floor as most were to heavy for me to lift onto the bench.  I don't know how the shearers pull sheep out all day.  I found  pulling the lambs out of the pens heavy work and the heaviest would have only been 30 kilos.  Our ewes range between 50 and 60 kilos and some of our rams topped 100 kilos.