Quandary

Part of our volunteer projects has been to investigate the possibility of fixing the upper pulley and installing a new halyard on the lighthouse flagpole. Remember this from a few years ago?

 

That's obviously never going to happen again, so Dave had to come with a plan that could make it so that anyone could service the aluminum pole. The original flagpole was shorter and made out of wood. A slot was made in the base, and it had a tabernacle so it could be raised and lowered with the aid of two fixed points and a block and tackle or come-along. Today we checked to see how far down the concrete base it went, and whether the base was solid concrete, or perhaps part of it was just concrete building blocks. First Dave drilled a hole into the pole and put down a wire to see how deep it was...it went all the way to the bottom, about four feet.

Then he drilled holes in the concrete in the top and side of the slot...unfortunately it's solid and would need to be jackhammered to access it.

The next quandary is how could this flagpole be lowered the first time to put a tabernacle on it? It is tall and on the side of a rocky hill. Definitely not a job for the volunteers!