16 ¼ hours. Into the woods by 5:15 AM. Back to the farmhouse by 9:30 PM. It’s been many years since we’ve had such a long day: that was before the R/O. We weren’t firing well. Too little wood and too far out of the firebox. Figured it out by 6:00 PM. Loaded the firebox with wood and pulled it closer to the front of the firebox. This gave sustained boils with firing every 20 minutes as opposed to firing every 7-10 minutes with weak boils. Burned a lot of wood with poor results.
Mid-30s overnight. Cloudy in the morning. Mostly sunny by late afternoon. The trees dripped. We had no bandwidth to collect. Focused on cooking. Miss the R/O, but have to focus on what we have instead of what could be.
We did finish three milk cans of syrup. Put the syrup into a 20 gallon stainless steel drum. This is a first for us.
The day cooking.
7:00 AM 22 ½”
8:00 AM 21 “
9:00 AM 19 ¼”
10:00 AM 18”
11:00 AM 16 ¾”
11:00 AM batch
12:00 PM 15 ½”
1:00 PM14 ¼”
2:00 PM 12 ½”
3:00 PM 11 1/8”
4:00 PM 9 ½”
5:00 PM 8 ½”
5:00m PM batch
6:00 PM 7”
7:00 PM 5 ½”
8:00 PM 3 ¾”
9:00 PM batch
9:05 PM 2”
9:20 PM done
9:30 PM farmhouse
Cook tomorrow again. Embrace the firing technique. Likely collect on Monday.