05-17-2024, 11:36 PM
(05-17-2024, 03:42 PM)randomq Wrote: I had an old Vietnam vet with a blurry spotting scope do mine. He sighted the pin down the street from mine, rotated 90 degrees, then just kept looking down that scope and cutting the line and tying flagger's tape on strings and adjusting the tape on the strings and when he got to the back his line was off from the pin by about 4 inches over 871 feet! They called him "The Magician". He was also a number theory hobbyist, and pretty sure he cracked the distribution of prime numbers and other secrets of the universe before going back into hiding.
Metaphysically speaking I think we are all off by a few lots. But at least this lot is full of interesting people.
That's impressive.
One thing I learned from cutting my property line is that if you can find a pin and know what the compass coordinates are, you can generally find your way to the other pin. After I got our property line marked I was still needing to cut over 1000' through a forest jungle that generally I could only see ahead as far as I could swing the machete. In some places the uluhe ferns were almost 20' tall so I couldn't even see landmarks like tall trees around me. It was super easy to wander off a straight line. I had to dig back decades to my boy scout training about how to use a compass and even went so far as finding my old boy scout compass. The iPhone compass is probably just as accurate but not easy to work with when cutting a line. The BS compass could be pinned to my shirt so I could see where my straight line needed to be just by looking down and it kept my hands free to work.
I haven't done this myself, but in most neighborhoods the property lines are consistent across the street (one would have to see a plat map to verify) where the pins are easiest to find. So if you find your property pin, your neighbor's across the street should be in the same place on the other side. Assuming both pins were placed correctly, if you run a string between them, and then use that to get your compass reading, in theory you could follow that bearing all the way to to the back pin. In Orchidland, for most spag lot properties, every other pin is directly behind a utility pole, usually 3-4 feet behind, so that makes finding every other pin pretty easy. HA has a similar layout from what I've seen, even though the lots are wider. If the pins are original, and weren't subsequently marked with something larger like a pipe, they can be very difficult to find even for a surveyor who knows where they are supposed to be. Sometimes the property boundary is in a puka, so they put the pin in the hole, which later got filled in. They generally have to get hammered into rock so they don't wander off, and if they dug a hole to reach rock, chances are it's filled in by now. The pin could be under a tree. Dead or alive it complicates finding it. Sometimes the pins can never be found and a surveyor has to put a new one in (something a pin finder can't do). I saw a property in HA with a cave opening that straddles the property line. They put the pin in the right spot, but you need a ladder and a flashlight to find it. Many of these properties have been surveyed over and over again, so there is a good chance that the pin has faded surveyors tape from long ago on it, and that is easier to see than the pin itself.
A surveyor told me that when the original pins were put in for these spag lots, access to the front was pretty straightforward and for the back pins they basically bulldozed a straight path between the access roads parallel to the numbered streets, so imagine where the back of one spag lot butts up against the back of the one from the block above or below yours, there was once a bulldozed path there to give them access to do the surveying and install the monuments. In a lot of these old neighborhoods the pigs have kept those paths somewhat clear. Usually the junk trees block their view from satellite and aerial photos but every now and then you can see them from above. At the back of our neighbor's lot it looks almost like an abandoned road but it doesn't show up on on satellite photos. So that's another way to assist in finding a back pin... if you find what looks like an old abandoned road running perpendicular to your spag lot, the pin is probably not going to be on the other side of it. Of course there are other indicators... people used to plant ti plants along property lines and sometimes marked the corners with trees. Coconuts seem to be popular. We have a bunch planted along the back property line of one our lots, and they are so stunted from shade and poor growing conditions they aren't easy to find. Sometimes all you'll find is a dead coconut husk.