“Ai ai ai” is “Oiyoiyoi” in Portuguese. Beth talked to our neighbour Ziza about our chewed pipe and cables in the swamp and she said it’s most likely a Ratão (Coypu in Enlgish) which is like a semi-aquatic giant rat (which is exactly what Ratão means in Portuguese) that lives in swamp regions. It could be many weeks before we can get better pipes and more cable delivered, so I decided to try and repair our current PVC pipe and cables and install it in a better way first. First I spent the morning fixing the LAN cable and patching up the PVC pipe to make it usable again.
Next I cleared a path all the way through with the weed-eater and installed fencing wire that I could attach the pipe to so that it’s not easily accessible from the ground or by climbing any trees. This way the entire pipe is in the clear and easily accessible by us but not by the swamp creatures!
Unfortunately this repaired cable only worked for about a day, and then the net started failing again! probably due to water entering the repaired parts or perhaps entering some areas of the cable that I had missed. At the moment I’m connected via another couple of lengths of spare cable which were in fairly good condition, but it’s just loosely tied onto the pipe so tomorrow we’ll have to pull the old cables out with strong string attached to the far end so that gets pulled in at the same time. Then we can use the string to pull the new cables through. I’m going to use the net for a while first so I can be sure that the cable is definitely working first.