Playing stuck in the mud

Wow what an adventure! This was definitely the muckiest and stinkiest community mission we have had so far, but we loved it! The weather was beautiful, we had a really warm welcome from our task owners Make Space for Life, and the task provided an epic workout.

Make Space for Life are a group of volunteers who have been maintaining and improving the National Trust owned North Town Moor area for the last decade or so, and our job was to help them clear reeds and debris from the pond for safety and aesthetics. A big thank you to Friends of Maidenhead Waterways for providing the waders, gloves and rakes for this task.

Amy, Jess, Matt, Nicola and Tara were the wading team. The pond is fed by run-off from surrounding roads, so it accumulates really horrible silt: tar-black, oily, smelly, and super sticky. It then gets clogged up with debris like sticks, dead weeds and litter. The water was waist deep and in places the silt was thigh high. Wading in this dense filth required every lower body muscle, and quite a lot of 'hope and prayer'! Faced with this stuff plenty of people would get that sinking feeling and want to run-off but thankfully we saw the fun side. I say thankfully because we couldn't have gone anywhere fast even if we had tried! We yanked out satisfying handfuls of reeds and sent them to the bank in a soupy human chain...

...where they were hauled out of the water by Juli, Anna and the Make Space for Life team. They heaved the weeds into wheelbarrows and ferried them along the bank, creating an impressive weed mountain. So satisfying to see!

By the end we all looked a bit like extras from some kind of sci-fi horror film, but Make Space for life kindly provided buckets of warm soapy water to round of our mud spa experience, as well as some wonderful snacks. We were also treated to a sighting of the moorhen family, which we had been careful to avoid whilst working in the pond.

Feeling a bit more human again, Juli, Anna and Amy completed the evening's adventure with a beautiful 5km run around North Town Moor and the Greenway - one of the routes from the June #Magpies150 Routemaster Challenge, and Matt, Nicola and Tara cycled home.

We had a lovely message from John at Make Space for Life the next day:

I just wanted to thank you and your team for the magnificent effort, you achieved far more than I possibly imagined you would. Please pass on my thanks to all concerned. In addition to clearing a large area of the pond from the reeds, I think we learned two important facts. Firstly it is still possible to move and work in the pond despite the mud and secondly it is possible to remove at least some of the reeds by hand.

Well done everyone, and an extra shout out to Anna and Matt, who were both celebrating reaching 10 good deeds with GoodGym.

We hope to return soon to test the limits of reed removal by hand a bit further!