HAPPY NEW YEAR !

Looking at the Blog before Christmas and feeling pretty guilty for not posting earlier I knew I had to get at least one more post done before the end of the year and here I sit just making my deadline by a few hours.

With the fall ending up with a bit of a rush on fall bookings it was a great end to the year and they were mostly completed before the snow hit. We would have liked to complete one more follow up survey, and one more late booking, but the snow and cold came and then pretty much stayed leaving 2 sites undone. Though we were hoping to get them done if it warmed enough, that just didn’t happen this year.

Though the surveys stopped, the “Busy” didn’t. We still had some items and equipment to get from MB after the sale of our property there so that kept us running for a bit with moving it here, and getting it into temporary storage. That was followed by an offer on our place in Calgary which meant we could now go looking for the place we wanted in the country. The looking was and is well underway and in the meantime we need to get packing things here as the buyer wants a pretty quick possession. The “Busy” will remain a few more weeks but we feel pretty confident we can be fully settled before the start of next survey season.

Though we haven’t completed a full review of the year we already know this is the best year ever with a better than a 90% success rate for hitting water on the drill behinds we know of in Alberta for 2010. We will be working on the results on the later drill behinds thru the winter and will post the results of on the blog sometime before spring along with new “blogged” testimonials. In the meantime if you need references we have lots of happy clients. Just give us a call.

Bookings for 2011 spring and summer are already higher now then they were last year in March. It appears the rural property development is picking up again as well as some of the spring work booked so far is for acreage sub divisions. Work on new acreages was almost non existent last year. All in all we are pretty excited for the new year as the water well drillers referrals continued to grow significantly this last year particularly from the “tough to find water” areas where they have followed dry holes on a property with success after our surveys. They continue to come. All good, Great really, as to us there is nothing better then getting our clients the water they need and we know the drillers feel the same.

On the pricing side? Our accountants are far enough along on our last year that they are already suggesting we may need to adjust our fees on surveys further away from home, particularly warning of the impact gas prices may have if they go where the experts say they might. We went thru that a couple of years ago when diesel went well over a dollar and stayed there for some time. It hurt to say the least. On their advice even if fuel remains the same we will need to adjust the way we charge on some of the more distant surveys particularly after the spring surveys, even more so if fuel prices rocket.

At this point it would be our intent to stay with prices as they were thru the first round of spring bookings when we have enough surveys in most areas that we can plan out initial routes economically thru each of the provinces. After that, likely by the end of May or early June it will just depend on the amount of bookings in a given area and the advance notice we receive on whether or not we need to add surcharges. Best to book way early. When we can cross a province and do 6-8 jobs on a loop the economy is just way better. BC clients have become pretty aware of this and will often book 6 months in advance. We already have a spring loop there that will let us hold 2010 price for those clients. It helps us and will help you a lot. We encourage you all to book as early as possible.

We will be posting thru the winter so keep checking in.

Happy New Year !