Long long day today... (15 hours in fact) but it was one of those days which is probably worth writing up. Typical of my luck here is all I shall say.
The plan was for me to travel one of our northern sites, approximately 4 hours drive away, reset the site, and then return to base. Simple in theory I hear you say. And you would be right. In theory.
So, up and left home about 6:45 this morning. Headed to the site, which was interesting in itself as I had never been that far north and didn't really know where I was going. Managed to locate the site entry, to find... this:
The lock which I had the key for was the one at the bottom, not in the loop. Not a brilliant start.
So, with a bit of cunning, I decided to utilize my socket set and removed the gate hinges from the post. First obstacle overcome.
Drove towards the site, and encountered some terrain, ie mud, in which 4WD would have been beneficial for forward progress. So, I engaged the free wheeling hubs and selected 4WD. Upon moving off, I was met with a loud clicking from the offside freewheeling hub. Not a good start. I was pretty confident after some experimentation that the hub was slipping under load. Not useful.
I managed to get to the site with a combination of lucky 2WDing and occasional gritted teeth intermittent use of the slipping 4WD in particularly steep bits.
Got to the site, and went to ring the controller to log on to the site. Except... my work phone had no coverage. Luckily my personal phone did, so I ended up calling them on that. Managed to log on, and get in, and reset the fault. Rang to confirm the fault was cleared, and they hit me with a list of other things which needed repairing. Anyhow, 2 hours later, I had completed the site work, and logged off site.
I rang the supervisor to advise him I was finished, and told him about the hub slipping, and he told me that there was another job which had just come in for a site another hour up the road. I said I may as well go to that as well, and headed down the hill.
Well, attempted to. Using the almost 4WD for the steep descents, and hoping it didn't give way completely, I crawled down to the flat again. I went back to 2WD where possible, until I hit a particularly soft bit of ground in which I had almost got stuck in on the way up. I decided I would be safer to engage the semi working 4WD, and worked up a bit of momentum and went for it. And got slower, and slower, and slower, and then stopped. With plenty of protesting from the nearly completely bust freewheeling hub.
And that, as they say, was that. I was not moving anywhere. After trying all the usual tricks I decided it wiser to ring work and get some recovery gear out. (As they don't carry anything in the trucks, not even a spade - this will be changed as of now if I get my way).
I sent a pxt of the stuck truck with the text "help?", and they called me back with a bit of a laugh. Righto, best we can do is leave now and see you in.... 4.5 hours. Great.
So... back to attempting self recovery whilst waiting.
I didn't have a shovel or spade, so I raided the truck for anything useful. The best I could find was a piece of pipe. So with the pipe and my bare hands I attempted to dig my way out. That successfully killed about an hour, but unfortunately the silt was filling the bits I was digging out as fast as I could remove it.
After giving up on that plan, I decided if I could get some material under the wheels I may be able to get some traction. So I went looking for some trees/rocks etc. Rocks, I couldn't find any. Trees, I found a couple of bits of dead wood, but they were about 50 meters away through long thick grass. So I took the pipe as a bit of a prodding stick and worked my way to the trees doing my best not to step on a snake.
I eventually managed to get some wood under the wheels, but no go, still bellied and the wheels were just spinning. Remember I only had 2WD in effect, as the front energy was all going out in the shot hub and not getting to the ground. That killed another hour.
After that, I sat in the truck and thought for a while, as my water supply was getting low and I didn't want to run out. I came up with the plan that I could use the pipe, hammer it into the ground, and then use some ratchet straps that were in the truck to strap the pipe to the wheel, and then the wheel would drive the pipe which should work me back out of the hole.
Didn't work.
And I now owe Ryan a new ratchet strap.
So at this point I had pretty much exhausted all available options and had run out of water, so I decided to go to sleep. Which took care of the remaining time period, until finally, the guy from work arrived!
Luckily he had purchased a spade on the way out upon my instruction, so we dug the wheels out and then managed to snatch the vehicle out. I miss my landrover. And my recovery gear. I managed to crawl my way out of the remaining track in 2WD, luckily.
Then I was in for the 4 hour drive home, in the dark by now. At least most of it is at the legal speed limit of 110 kmph, and in all the 8 hours ish of driving I did today, not one police car to be seen.
About an hour from home, the hub decided to start to seize, and the truck started to pull more and more to the left... luckily I made it home before it seized or gave way completely. Yet another Nixon vehicle in for repair...
And here was me thinking I had finally found one with no faults. Ha. Like fun.
To give you kiwi's an idea...
Drive from Christchurch to Dunedin, get stuck, then call up your mate in Christchurch to pull you out. He will drive down, recover you, and then you both drive back to CHCH. And you pretty much have my day.
Here's a few photos from the day...
I for one am off to bed.
TTFN.
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