Unpopular take: I ditched my hydraulic cutter for a wire saw on a mudflat job near Galveston

Everyone in our crew swears by hydraulic cutters for underwater vegetation, but on a job two months ago in the Galveston channel, the cutter kept clogging with silt and dead grass. I switched to a manual wire saw - the kind you use in pairs - and it cut through the roots way cleaner. Sure, it took me and a deckhand about 45 extra minutes per pass, but I didn't have to stop and unclog every 10 feet. The operator on the barge laughed at me until he saw the material pile up without needing a second pass. Has anyone else tried old-school tools over modern ones when the conditions get weird?

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gavine4113h ago

Man, that's exactly the kind of stuff I ran into last summer cutting marsh grass in Louisiana. Our hydraulic cutter turned into a clog machine in the muddy water, but a wire saw with a strong partner just chewed through everything without constant stops. It's wild how sometimes the old beat-down methods win when the fancy gear gets humbled by the mud.