After the events of the preceding week, I decided it was about time I constructed another update. No Emus involved this time.
I better start at the beginning, for that seems the most appropriate place to start. No sense in putting the cart before the horse, as they say. Unless it’s one of those rare North Zambician “push” horses, of course. Then it would make perfect sense.
Monday. Pretty straight forward, no major dramas. Usual bench work in the workshop, and a plan somewhere in the back of the mind to do a service trip the next day. Left work around 1800, finally all loaded up and ready for the 300 KM one way trip the next day.
Tuesday. Left town by 7:00, mainly because the apprentice whom I was taking with me lived out of town and had a 20 minute drive to Gladstone as it was, so I didn’t want to inconvenience him too much. Hit the road, and drove to our first site of the job, the Blackdown Tablelands National Park. This is a pretty interesting area, and well worth a look.
We drove up the access road, following our map. This map was a good idea; it had precise kilometre readings for certain landmarks, so it made it theoretically impossible for us to get lost. Ideal, I thought. Until the first 4 landmarks were about 600 meters off their mark. Deciding to then take the map with a grain of salt, (and/or pepper, depending on your preference) we continued on, and promptly ended up at a dead end, in a camping ground. Determining we must have missed a turn somewhere, we backtracked, and finally spotted the access road to the site. Which had a large “Road Closed” sign across it. Luckily, we had noted that the park rangers were operating on one of the local CB channels, and we called them up. Finally getting a response, they authorised us to cross the road closed sign, warning us that there was a boggy patch about 3 KM in and also to watch out for falling trees, as they had just had a fire go through. Taking this information and storing it in my memory banks for future reference, we began the drive up the 4WD track toward the site.
The track wasn’t bad going, and although slightly wet in places with the occasional good sized puddle, we didn’t appear to have any major problems. Until I managed to get a stick wedged between my bulbar and bonnet, which left some good marks in the paint, a slight depression to the shape of the bonnet, and wedged my plastic grill out of its mountings. After some persuasion we managed to free the stick and repair the displaced grill. We continued on our way, and eventually made it to a sign, saying “300 meters to lookout”. I found this odd, as our map said the sign should have read “2.5 KM to lookout”. Remembering that the previous readings were not entirely accurate, we decided that perhaps the map was wrong in this case also and we must be on the right track. We paused briefly at the lookout for a bit of a... look, and took a couple of photos. Quite interesting, you could see a long way, mostly across bush land.
We didn’t want to waste too much time, as we were planning on completing this job quickly and continuing on to spend the night in Emerald, which was another 150 KM away. With that in mind, we left the lookout and measured the next distance, which according to our map was another 1.6 KM or so up the track. We continued on. The track was passable, but getting noticeably worse in places. We drove down one bit which was slightly down hill and looked solid, but as we drove it I could feel the truck sinking and I said to the apprentice “this could be interesting on the way back”. We carried on to where the map said the site should be, but couldn’t find it anywhere. We drove a bit further, still nothing. I performed some basic direction finding techniques on the radio channel which we were going to service, and it indicated that the repeater was back from where we were. Deciding we must have yet again missed a turn somewhere, we had a quick bite to eat, then turned the truck around and started to head back, keeping our eyes peeled for any sign that the site was nearby.
All was going well, until we came across that patch which I mentioned before. I lined up the truck, and got up as much momentum as I could, for I knew it was going to be interesting, and went for it.
Well, I wasn’t wrong. It was interesting. It was very interesting right up to the point when we became hopelessly stuck. I looked at the apprentice, and said “oh bother”. Or some words to that effect anyway. We surveyed the situation, and decided it was worth having a go with the shovel and trying to dig our way out. We managed to find a few rocks and sticks and we managed to get some of that under the wheels. I jumped in and gave it a shot... and we moved about 2 inches. By now we had been stuck for about an hour and a half. I said to the apprentice that we would give it one more shot, but if we weren’t out by 14:30 we would call in some help.
We kept digging and slopping around in the mud, and long story short, got nowhere. I had an idea, so we got a rope out of the back of the truck, and ran it between our truck and a conveniently placed tree a couple of times. I got my crowbar out of the truck and stuck it in the middle. I began to wind it up, theoretically shortening the rope and pulling us out. About 50 turns in, I decided to get my hardhat and safety goggles from the truck, as there was a bit of tension on the rope, and thus also on the crowbar. I didn’t particularly want to let it go and have it meet my skull if I could help it. I made sure the apprentice was hiding in the truck, both so he didn’t lose his head and also so he could apply the power at the appropriate time. I wound up this rope until I couldn’t get any more out of it, and we managed to move the truck about another 4 inches. Starting to realise this wasn’t going to be as easy as I had anticipated, I decided the wisest thing to do at this point was to summon reinforcements.
I called the rangers on the radio. No response. I had half a bar of cellphone reception, which luckily was enough for a broken phone conversation back to work. They managed to get me the cellphone number of the ranger, and I rung it. Straight to voice mail. Ideal. I persisted, and got nowhere.
I went back to sitting in the truck and attempted to think of another way around this slight inconvenience. There were plenty of trees around, if I had a winch, I would have been out in half an hour. But I didn’t, so there wasn’t much point in thinking about “what ifs”. Just then, the radio crackled into life.
“Nixon communications, are you on channel Nixon communications?”
I grabbed the mic.
“Nixon’s copies, go ahead.”
“Yea, are you guys stuck out there?”
“We certainly are... what’s the chances of a recovery?”
“Yea... was going to be pretty good, we sent a lady out with a 4WD and a winch. She’s about 3 KMs before the lookout... but there’s a slight catch.”
“Oh righto, thanks for that. What’s the catch?”
“Uhhh... She’s bogged too. And doesn’t really know how to use a winch.”
“Uh huh. Excellent. Worth us walking up and helping her?”
“Yes please, that would be great. I’m on my way too, but about an hour away still.”
“Righto, no problems, will catch you there.”
So, we had a chance of recovery, but it was about 4 KM from where we were stuck. Luckily, I had packed my walking boots just that morning. We got some water, my recovery gear, and some jackets, and started walking. It was about half four, and we could tell dusk was approaching fast. Up at that altitude the air temperature is pretty cool, and there was a breeze blowing that cut straight through you. About 25 minutes later, we arrived at the stuck rescue vehicle. After the introductions, I had a look at the winch, and wasn’t filled with much hope. The last person who had used it hadn’t wound it back under tension, and there was a huge birdsnest of wire rope in there. To make matters worse, the plate which holds the wire to the winch drum had come loose, and the winch drum was just winding itself around and around inside the tangle of wire.
It never rains... it pours.
If we had the vehicle mobile, I would have been able to tie the winch to something and pull it out to repair it, but unfortunately that was out of the question. Luckily, at that point, the 2nd ranger arrived in his truck, but with a working winch. We recovered the first ranger vehicle, and because it’s winch was stuffed, we opted to leave it there for now and take the good vehicle down to pull mine out. We jumped on the back of the tray, as it was a 3 seater, and the rangers drove us all back down to my truck. The ranger drove to within snatch strap range of my truck. “We will soon have you out of this!” he exclaimed. I sincerely hoped he was right, as it was getting darker by the minute. We attached my snatch strap, and he backed up and managed to move my truck about a foot. Still stuck. He backed up again for another shot... and broke through the hardish surface, straight into the mud. Bogged. Going nowhere. Great.
He jumped out, scratching his head. “Well this makes it more interesting.” I said. “Yeeeaaahhh...” he drawled in reply. There was about a truck length of usable ground between us, so we decided to attach his winch to my truck and pull himself forwards onto the hard ground. This was good in theory, until he pulled up to within about a foot of my vehicle and was still bogged. We hatched a plan C, and decided to winch the front of his truck around to a nearby tree, thus allowing him to try to turn around. Well, all this did was move him on a slight angle to the left... still well stuck.
At this point, we decided the best thing to do was to walk back (yet again) to the third vehicle, and use it to pull his vehicle out, and then ultimately mine would be freed also. So, I drew the short straw, and walked back to the 3rd vehicle. As I got closer, I thought it was odd that the truck was on such a lean, I didn’t remember leaving it like that. As I approached, I discovered we hadn’t left it like that at all, in our absence the weight of the Landcruiser had pushed it into the soft ground all down one side. Feeling an impending sense of dread as to what I anticipated was about to happen... I started it up. And sure enough... went nowhere.
Did I say “pours”? I meant to say “falls in torrents”.
Feeling somewhat dejected, yet also laughing so much at the absurdity of the situation, I radioed the ranger with the good news. They decided to walk up as well with my shovel to see if we could free it. 25 mins later, darkness was almost here, we were very almost needing torches. They arrived at the cruiser, and after 10 minutes of trying, we decided it was a lost cause. Looking around for inspiration, we realised there was a quad bike on the back of this vehicle. We didn’t have ramps, but we decided to throw it off the back of the ute anyway and see if we could free the truck. We gave it one or two attempts, but we could tell straight away it was a lost cause. By now, it was dark, and quite cold, even by NZ standards. We decided there was no point in continuing in the dark, and the ranger said we could spend the night at her place and then go back in the morning to try to free the vehicles in daylight. One of the rangers and I took the bike down to my truck to get some clothes, as the apprentice and I were both completely covered in mud, while the apprentice and the other ranger began to walk back about 12 KM to the ranger station. We eventually caught up with them on the bike, and rearranged ourselves like a giant game of tetris until we managed to find a way to get four of us on the quad bike. Perhaps not real safe I know, but it sure beat walking through the mud.
By the time we made it back to the ranger’s house, the ranger in the front was frozen, and we were all pretty shaken up by the bumps on the road due to the bottomed out suspension of the bike with all the added weight. This was about eight o’clock, and we were all pretty hungry. Luckily the ranger who lived up here had her personal vehicle at the house, so we took that down to drop the other ranger at his house, and also to head into Dingo for a meal. I shouted her the meal as a thanks for having us, and we headed back up to her place with a couple of extra blankets from the other ranger. It gets pretty cold up there, 6 degrees that evening. I was pretty thankful for the extra blankets, and I was even more thankful that she took us under her wing and we didn’t have to sleep in the truck. It turned out she was a fellow Kiwi, so that helped. She joked that in the tri-nations it didn’t matter who won, as she was from South Africa, has NZ citizenship, but lived in Australia.
Come the next morning, we were up at the crack of dawn. I had tried to arrange another Nixon vehicle to come out the night before, but didn’t manage to get very far. Finally by 9:00 they managed to get someone underway and on the road, but it’s a good 3 and a half hours or so from Gladstone so we were going to have to wait a while. Around about 10ish however, a third ranger vehicle arrived from Rocky. This was lucky, as the entire Blackdown ranger fleet was currently stuck up the hill. We all piled in and drove back up to the first vehicle for another crack. We recovered that pretty easily, and drove both right up to the lookout, which was about 800 meters up from where my truck was still immovable. This time, the ranger backed the good vehicle down toward the stuck vehicles, theory being this time if he got stuck again we could at least winch it out back up the hill. We tied all the straps we had together, and managed to snatch recover his 4WD from about 50 meters away. We left the Rocky ranger vehicle and the now freed ranger vehicle tied together for an anchor, and ran out the winch cable toward my vehicle. We couldn’t get a straight pull, so we rigged a tree with a snatch pulley and managed to get a reasonable line that way. With some winching we managed to pull my truck finally free from the bog! We were all pretty happy about this, and then realised that we now had 4 vehicles and only 3 experienced drivers. We eventually decided to let the apprentice drive my vehicle back, and I drove the 3rd ranger vehicle. This probably wasn’t the wisest call, as after driving the V8 turbodiesel Landcruiser my 6 cylinder lump seems even more gutless, but however, we managed to get all the vehicles back to the lookout. We decided we would carry on back up the track to the repeater, and the two rangers would carry on... doing whatever rangers do, and we had to have the 3rd ranger vehicle back to them by 3 o’clock that afternoon. This gave us about 4 hours on the site, which was just enough I thought. We settled on that plan, and then continued up the road. Just as we got to the turnoff to the repeater (which I had managed to miss on the way out), we could see there appeared to be another vehicle in the distance. We drove up to it, and sure enough... a member of the public had blatantly driven through the “road closed” sign without permission and had got himself bogged right where the first ranger vehicle had been stuck. As if this wasn’t bad enough, his mate had tried to drive around him to rescue him, and had got even more stuck off the side of the track. The ranger shook his head, turned to me, and said “here we go again.”
As they required the Rocky vehicle back urgently, we decided to walk in to the repeater and start our work whilst the rangers rescue the two stuck vehicles. Afterwards we learnt that they received a stern talking to and a fine. Apparently the reason they went through the road closed sign was to see why the rangers had closed the road. Needless to say, this excuse didn’t go far with the rangers.
Meanwhile, the apprentice and I had got to the repeater site and began our work. Long story short, the fault was with the hardest to reach “worst case scenario” option of all the causes that it could have been. Accordingly, this took a little longer than anticipated, and the ranger called us up about 3 o clock asking how we were getting on. I informed him that it was the worst case scenario but we were almost finished. He jokingly replied... “Of course it would be the worst case option, the luck we have had the last couple of days it couldn’t possibly be anything else!”
He was right, of course.
Anyhow, eventually we finished, and drove both vehicles back to the required destination. We thanked our hosts for their help and kindness, and headed off to Emerald. A day later than scheduled perhaps, but we learnt a lot about the wildlife of Blackdown (staying with the rangers ensured that!) and we certainly now know where the repeater site is.
We drove the 120 odd KM to Emerald, arriving around about 6 o clock. We thought we may as well book in to a motel for the night. As we drove around looking, we began to notice one common factor. All the motels had “No Vacancy” signs up outside. Not to be beaten, we used the GPS and went to every accommodation location listed. Alas, there was still no room at the inn. I was beginning to feel like Mary and Joseph. Even the camping grounds were all full. We tried a place by a lake, 20 mins out of town. No room. We rang all the places in Capella, 50 KM away. No room. We checked Bluff, Comet, Blackwater, and Dingo. (All back where we had come from.) No rooms. We checked Gemfields and Rubyvale, out past Emerald. No room. By now it was around 8 o’clock, and we decided bugger it, we will just sleep in the truck. We decided to drive out to a dam which was just out of town for a look, and just by chance, came across a brand new 4 star motel which wasn’t on the GPS. It had a no vacancy sign on, but we figured we didn’t have anything to lose.
We went in to the reception and asked the lady at the counter if she had any room. She advised is she did not. Just as she did, another fellow was walking past and stopped and said “Hang on, what about that room?” She said that it was “tentatively booked” but she would ring the customer and find out if he still wanted it. She rang him, and discovered that he was already at the motel in a room. Long story short, he had been issued a new room and thus been double booked. Hooray! Room after all! It wasn’t terribly cheap but it sure beat sleeping in the truck.
As we still had about 100 KM further to go to get to our second job, we decided to start early. We left the motel about half 5 in the morning, and had a quick bite to eat at McDonald’s on the way out of town. Strangely enough, we managed to find our way to the access road without too much difficulty this time. We drove up to this little shack hidden about 3 KM up a 4WD track way in the bushland, and met the landowner. We had a small job to do for him first, so we did that, and it transpired that him and his wife were going on a holiday in NZ in September. So after telling a few sheep jokes, he moved on to ask about what things he should see and do in the South Island while he was there for a week. So by the time we had discussed that, a good hour had passed, but I felt that we had made a new friend there. This was reportedly one of the worst tracks that Nixon’s had gear at, but old mate had spent the last 4 days on his dozer fixing the track up so we managed to get to the site in about an hour and a half. I couldn’t really get lost this time because all I had to do was follow the dozer tracks.
We got to the site OK, and managed to change over the feeders that were burnt in a bushfire. As it was we were cutting it fine, we only just completed the job and got the truck packed again by the time darkness fell. By “got the truck packed” I actually meant “threw everything in, in no apparent order.” We got down the track and hit the main road; it was now around 8 o’clock. I realised I hadn’t yet got around to wiring up my spotlights, which was a shame, as they would have been pretty handy. We finally made it back to Emerald, and I decided to wire the lights up. We tossed around the idea of staying in Emerald the night, but remembering how difficult it was the night before, we decided to just head back the 400 odd KM back to Gladstone. A long drive, but the apprentice kept me awake with endless questions, which was good. We finally arrived back to town at about halfpast one the following morning, after getting stuck behind a couple of cattle road trains. No chance of passing those things in an underpowered overloaded Landcruiser unfortunately.
I got home and fell into bed, I reckon I was just about asleep before my head hit the pillow. When my alarm went off at 6:30 I came very close to throwing it out the window, but I decided to go to work and unpack my truck and catch up on paperwork. When I showed up, after the usual ribbing about getting stuck, they informed me that you are supposed to have a 10 hour stand down period after working that late. Wish I had thought of that before I got up that morning. As it was, I got the truck sorted, minor damage to the bonnet seemed about the only thing wrong with the old girl. I went back into the workshop planning on doing some bench work, and ended up getting sent to an interesting job instead.
The Endeavour, well, a replica at least, was in port. The PA system had been wired by some cowboy in Sydney and it wasn’t working, so they asked us to fix it. To get to the amp was interesting; you kind of lay on the floor and wiggled into a tiny cubby hole. As you can imagine, there is not a lot of room on that boat. Long story short we managed to get that going too, and the captain was most thankful.
So, a fairly fun filled week you might say. 1300 KM round trip in the end, so a fair few KMs covered also. At the end of the day however, that’s what this job is all about. You don’t know where you might be one week to the next, from the workshop, to stuck on a hilltop, to in the bowels of the endeavour.
Did I say “Falling in torrents?” I might just be soaked to the skin, but in this moment, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
