You never miss the water until the well runs dry.

We woke up at midnight to find we had no water.  Yikes!  So we wandered around in the dark looking for faucets that could have been left on (no luck) and realized that the well had run dry.

Fortunately, we have a backup system where we can turn a valve and switch to the lake irrigation system water.  When we switched, the lake pump never quit running, so we knew we had a serious leak somewhere.  The lake is an unlimited supply of water, so we left the pump running all night so that we could still have water.  After we did that at midnight, we tried to sleep while we waited for light. When we got up this morning, we isolated the problem to the log house, so we started digging.

Fortunately we have tools so it wasn't all done by hand, but we had to avoid propane lines, phone lines, and power lines that also cross the yard where we have water lines for both the lake system and the well system.

That tiny yellow line is the propane line - we managed to find it and the phone line without damaging them.

 The exposed pipe is from an old water line - this house was built in 1940, and water piped from the lake in the years before the well was installed.  As we dug, we had to identify every line we found to avoid destroying something we still use.

We found the leak at the very end of the line - when we were just about ready to give up - When you have the most perkable soils in the history of the world, you have to be within a foot of a 5000 gallon leak to see any evidence of it. 

The leak is repaired, but both of us may need a few hours of rest to get ourselves repaired.  We can cover up our digging tomorrow!