Working for Offshore Navigation Inc (ONI)

 

Kiwai Island

So a couple of days after Christmas 1968, 
I was on a flight to Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.

The real adventure was about to begin!

Dawn on 31 December found me in Port Moresby airport, waiting for a charter flight to Daru Island.

I had to leave the hotel before breakfast, and none was available here, only really terrible coffee from a machine. I need breakfast to get my day going, so was really feeling empty….. We finally arrived at Daru about midday, and I was picked up by our rep there. He took me straight to the ‘social club’, which was just a place for the expatriates to drink, and boy did they drink, especially on New Years Eve! I still hadn’t had anything to eat, and there was no café on the island, so had to depend on vague promises for some one to take me to a lady somewhere who could make me a meal. I waited and waited, but they were too busy drinking to bother with my needs…. Of course I had to join in with the drinking when with a crowd like that, when one after another would ‘shout’ me (Australian for buy me a drink), cause you’re considered very unsociable if you don’t accept a ‘shout’ from anyone. Then of course I had to ‘shout’ drinks in return, so around and around it went, still on an empty stomach……  So I was feeling pretty rotten by the time the small boat was ready to take me to my base station on Kiwai island. It was dark by the time we set out, in a local cargo boat usually used for collecting copra from the islands. I had been advised that the base station had been recently supplied with lots of food, and only to bring some fresh meat.  On the boat there was a really basic place to cook (couldn’t call it a kitchen at all) below deck, so thought this was my chance to eat something. It was right beside the roaring engine, and filthy, with cockroaches scampering over everything. I tried to fry a piece of meat, but with the hot oil smell of the old diesel engine and the rolling of the boat, and all the rotten beer, my stomach rebelled and I had to rush back to the fresh air on deck…..

We finally arrived at the station on Kiwai Island about midnight. Of course it was dark outside, so all I could see was the light inside the palm-thatched shack, all lit up by a generator thumping away in the night. The very first thing that the operator said was, “Didn’t you bring any beer for me to drink on the way back??” He was an old hand with the company, who had worked many rough and wild places in the Philippines and Indonesia, but had ‘gone troppo’ (somewhat crazy and erratic from too much tropical heat and bad booze). He’d now gone completely alcoholic and undependable, so the company was replacing him, and he knew this would be his last posting so was in a bad mood…. He was dressed only in a sarong, and I could hardly see him for the cloud of mosquitoes. This was the ‘wet’ monsoon season so they were really thick. There were cases and cases of insect repellent in the corner of the shack. He got out a whole box of mosquito coils and crumpled them up into a big empty fruit can, then poured in some methylated  alcohol and lit it. A mushroom cloud of pyrethrum  smoke billowed out and filled the shack. That brought down a shower of dead mosquitoes and moths, and all sorts of other bugs that had lived in the thatched roofing. He definitely had tropical experience….. There was a local native Papuan sitting by the door, whom the old operator dismissed as being just a useless camp helper.

This was my very first posting, so I was wanting to get a thorough briefing on the equipment and operation of the station, but he wasn’t at all helpful. Then I went outside to throw up all that rotten beer, and passed out…… When I woke up, being sucked dry by the mosquitoes, he had gone on board the boat and was chugging away into the night…… So I was now on my own and feeling really rotten, so crawled under the mosquito net hanging over the cot and went to sleep…….

Woke up late next morning, with the sun shining, the lights still on and the generator still thumping away, and the native helper still sitting by the door. Of course by now I was really starving. Went to the shelves where the food was stored and found them nearly empty! It seems that he’d been trading the food supply for locally made ‘tuba’ (alcohol from fermented palm sap).  That food was supposed to have lasted until the next monthly supply boat…..  So for breakfast I had some of the steak I’d brought along. No bread or rice to with it, all that had been traded away, but at least my stomach felt better with some real food. Even found some instant coffee because apparently the natives didn’t want to trade for that…..

Now I had to figure out what the heck I was supposed to be doing there…… There was a two-way radio but he hadn’t told me who was on the network or what I was supposed to do. So I just made a call, “Hello, Hello, anyone copy…??” Had to call a couple of times, then some one came back, “Who’s that on our frequency…??” I told them who I was and where I was, and then they realized that I had replaced the erratic old bugger on Kiwai. They told me the radio schedules to keep in touch, and explained what I needed to do to operate the equipment. Fortunately I’m pretty good at adapting and improvising, so it all went pretty well after that. Well, I came for adventure and this was going to be it!

The reason for being  there was to provide the radio signals necessary for determining the precision location for a drilling rig out of sight of land. This was before GPS. The equipment onboard the drilling rig could measure the exact distance to each base station, and thus determine the exact location. So my job was to keep the transmitter and generator at my station operating when needed.

This is the way the station looked in daylight.

Muddy water, black sand, and swamp behind….
Hardly your vision of an idyllic tropical island….

 

 

This was my precious mosquito net over the army cot.

Also my shortwave radio to tune into the world at night when reception was good.
Also my ‘office’, with the two-way radio, (left disassembled by the previous operator….. )

This was the equipment corner.

Note the cases of mosquito repellent in the corner.
And a bunch of bananas.

The kitchen corner.

This was the pantry corner when all stocked up after a monthly supply run.

Living mostly on canned food.
A small kerosene powered fridge that worked most of the time, but not dependably…..

But when I arrived the pantry was really bare, a bag of flour that had solidified in the tropical heat and humidity, and a few stray cans of food that the locals wouldn’t trade for. And I could agree with them when I opened a big can containing a whole duck from Singapore. I don’t know if it was meant to be that way but the smell and sight inside were revolting! The steaks I had brought only lasted for a couple of days, so I radioed the rep on Daru that I needed more food. Periodically he had to over- fly in a light plane to calibrate the navigation system, and offered to airdrop me some more food. But he didn’t bother to wrap it securely, so when it hit the ground the parcel burst open and covered the meat in sand…. Couldn’t find a way to scrape/wash it all off so just ate gritty steak. There was a small kerosene fridge that could keep meat only a couple of days. Didn’t need steak anyhow, I needed rice, that’s the staple food in the tropics.  For carbohydrates the natives live on sago which is a heavy gluttonous starchy smelly glug, derived with great amounts of hard work from the pith of sago palms. I could eat it, but only if desperate….

 I still had lots of kerosene and could trade that with the natives for chicken eggs and turtle meat to get protein.  I made an oven from a 20 litre kerosene drum and a baking pan from a 4 litre oil can, then crushed up that bag of flour with a hammer and sifted it through insect screen, and was able to bake a very heavy bread.

There were several small villages along the coast, but none had a trade store. Then I learned that across on the other side of the island was a mission station, and they kept a good supply of food.  Those low-lying delta islands have a band of sand only slightly above sea level, then a wet swamp in the interior. I hired a guide and he took me across the swamp, often balancing on logs perched above the wettest parts.

The missionaries were Catholic  French Canadians, and very isolated, so they welcomed a fellow Canadian as a visitor. The nuns set a fine meal and we had a jolly time chatting about everything. Then they raided their stores and loaded me up with canned food and rice. The priest was having problems with his electrical generator, so I offered to help him get it working.

 Now I suppose you have images of a classical tropical coral island, with clean white sand, crystal blue water, and coconut trees. Well, not so at all. This is a delta island at the mouth of the Fly River. Yes there are palm trees, but dark grey sand and lots of mud, surrounded by dark muddy river water full of hunting sharks and crocodiles. Only a narrow beach, never more than a few feet above sea level, and the interior is a fetid swamp….. This time of year hot and very humid, and monsoon torrential rain, and swarms of malarial mosquitoes. Not where you’d come to stay by choice, but I stayed there for 6 months, and enjoyed it…..

Soon after I arrived, an old native came around asking for newspaper. I didn’t have a newspaper but figured he wanted something to read so gave him a LIFE magazine. He looked a bit awkward but thanked me profusely and carried it away very carefully. Next day he returned it, asking again for newspaper….. I didn’t yet understand that they roll their ‘black twist’ tobacco in newspaper to smoke it, and the glossy magazine wasn’t suitable at all! Then lots of others came wanting to buy sticks of the tobacco but I only had enough to supply my camp helper Bunii. They had money to pay and asked me to order lots more tobacco on the supply run next month because they didn’t have a store on the island.  So I ordered a case of it.

In the meantime the island was out of tobacco, and that was serious. If you’ve ever been in a house with a tobacco addict who’s out of tobacco and can’t get to town for more, you’ll have seen him pacing all day long and hunting around all over for stray butts. That’s just the way it was for the whole island. I was used to the regular ‘traffic’ of a couple of people every day walking by from one village to the other, but now there were dozens pacing back and forth and stopping to pester me for some of the tobacco that I kept for Bunii. That behaviour demonstrated that smoking is not just an oral habit or a casual way to look cool, cause this ‘twist’ tobacco is serious stuff. It’s the actual leaf of the tobacco plant, twisted into a stick. It’s called ‘black twist’, because of the black nicotine and tar oozing out. Far stronger than any pipe tobacco.  They shred it and roll it in newspaper, so you can imagine the throat-burning  flavour! I don’t know where it’s grown, but it’s a major trade commodity in these islands. Going price was 10 cents a stick in those days, and it was often a necessary part of the payment to settle a deal. Then when my supply boat came with the case of ‘twist’, everyone showed up at my shack with real money to buy their ‘fix’. And then the traffic between villages stopped altogether as they all sat at home and smoked. Until the case was empty, long before the next boat was due, and the pacing commenced again….. Next month I ordered two cases, and even that wasn’t enough…..

But an interesting sidebar to the tobacco story….. When I was visiting the Catholic mission I noticed they had plenty of twist tobacco on hand, so I asked the smokers who were pestering me why they didn’t go over there to buy some?? Answer was that, “Missionaries no sell twist, they use for ‘bait’ to catch us, then preach Jesus and Holy Mary and want our kids in school, not worth it….”

That’s Bunii with his wife and children.

The native helper was named Bunii, and he was a real gentleman. He was a senior man in his village, and made sure that no one pestered or thieved from me. He camped in a tent nearby and really took his responsibility seriously to look after me and the camp.

He trimmed the grass with a machete and made sure that the bucket shower was always full.

His pay was set at $4 plus 7 sticks of twist tobacco per week.

He spoke really basic English, and had been to Sydney during WW2, as a deckhand on a ship. His memory was of the tall buildings, “…Big house to much….”. I remember sitting on the beach and watching the moon rise, and telling him that the Americans were orbiting it right then, but got no response, cause of course to him the moon was just a light in the sky, not something you could fly around……

He made my stay there really easy. Stations at other parts of the coast had lots of problems with thievery, but he guarded really carefully.

This is the ‘eTAMBU’ gate he erected. It’s a sign in all these islands that means “Forbidden to go here”.

 

 

 That thatched shack was such a fine dwelling for the climate!

All built with bush materials and without any nails or fasteners.
It was a real work of art, as you’ll see in the photos.
All lashed together with plant fibres.
Much better insulation than a tin roof, and not as noisy in the torrential tropical rain storms.

Really ingenious  roof thatch. Made from sago palm leaves folded around the central stem of a frond, then each pinned in place with the portion of the spine of that leaf that was removed to allow it to fold over. So neat and tidy and economical with materials.  And durable in the storms.

280mm (11”) of rain in one night, and not a leak anywhere!

 

 And a clean, comfortable, springy  floor woven from split cane.

This was really comfortable living, couldn’t ask for better…..

The previous operator, despite all his faults, was really experienced in this sort of work in the tropics and knew well how to set up such a comfortable camp.

This is the shower and toilet facility.

The shower was a bucket with a shower rose attached to the bottom, hung on a rope over a pulley. Fill the bucket and pull it up on the pulley, then just twist the rose to open and shower. No need of hot water in that climate.

The toilet was just a hole in the floor over a hole in the ground.

 

This was the monsoonal ‘wet’ season, so it was very hot and humid, so I really looked forward to the cool shower just before sundown. Soon after the sun went down the mosquitoes came out in hungry hoards, so it was important to be prepared.

After the shower I changed into jeans and a long sleeved shirt and socks. Yes socks are very important in the evening in the malarial tropics. Malarial mosquitoes head straight for the ankles, especially when the feet are under a table in the dark. The socks also allow a heavy use of repellant without soaking the skin. Then a heavy spray of repellant on the shirt cuffs and then wipe that lightly around the neck and ears and back of hands, and that makes a cloud of repellant vapour all round without applying directly to the skin. Once in awhile respray the socks and cuffs. Very effective, and  a lot less personal exposure to the chemical than spraying directly on the skin. Of course I took my anti-malarial tablets regularly, but I reckon it’s even better to prevent being bitten at all than to try to kill the parasites with medicine. I never got malaria despite many years in bad malarial areas, so the method worked.

Prepare and eat dinner early before the mossies come out, then there was no reason to stay up late anyhow, so the best place was in bed under the net, with the constant whine of frustrated mossies hovering outside and sitting all over the net….. Of course need a pee bottle cause no way going to get out from under that net in the middle of the night and get attacked and then let in a bunch of them while getting back under the net….. So from about 7pm to sunrise makes for a long night on a less than comfortable canvas army cot …..  And not much reading material…..

 So I set the shortwave radio so I could tune it through the net, then roamed the world, listening to Radio Australia International, BBC World Service, Voice of America, Radio Moscow, Netherlands, Germany, and all the other English language services from so many countries that were available on shortwave in those days.  Not much reception in the daytime, but at night the upper ionosphere creates ‘skip’ conditions that funnel those shortwave signals from the other side of the world, so many stations booming in that the bands were crowded and difficult to separate one from the other. Biggest nuisance there was the tropical lightning storms in the ‘wet’ season that caused much interference.  That international shortwave listening  was a really good pastime on that isolated island, and since listening to those international stations had been a hobby in teenage times I knew how to get the best of it.

My supplies came only once a month by boat.  A classic old trading ketch.

Fuel for the generators, food, and mail.

Of course that was an exciting event each time!

Fresh vegetables and real meat! At least enough for a few days.

The boat would stay overnight and I’d sleep onboard that night, and drink a couple of cold beers and yarn with the captain and deckhand, and borrow a couple of books. Then next morning they’d sail away again and I’d be left alone until next mont

 

And I did enjoy the isolation once again, suits me just fine….

I really enjoyed receiving supplies only once a month. It really spaced out the pace of life and actually helped avoid routine and boredom. I guess I need to explain that…..

Of course a bundle of mail was immediately exciting! A quick opening to see if anything needed a response to go back with the boat. And the satisfaction of a deposit slip for another months wages gone directly to the bank account, without having spent any of it.

Then the first week of reading the mail, enjoying the fresh food, and any new books from the boat. And dolling out the twist tobacco to the islanders, and making them all quiet and peaceful again.

The second week was the dullest…… Mail and books all read and re-read, canned food routine again, with three weeks yet to go before another run…….

Then the third week got more exciting again, cause it was time to draw up a wish list of what I wanted in the next supply run and radio it to Moresby. I always enjoyed that.

Then the fourth week was the building expectation of hearing that the boat had sailed and it’s progress along the coast. Write any last letters to go. Get the empty fuel drums ready to ship.

That’s how each month passed for me.  Of course there was always the routine of the work.

 This job was serving a drilling rig out in the Gulf of Papua. It was drilling exploratory wells, and moving about every three weeks. We had to be able to provide a radio signal for a couple of days each time, to allow it to locate the new position. Then we were on standby until the next move. Radio skeds three times a day when on standby. Only a few minutes each time to check that all is well.

So lots of time for just loafing around…. What an easy job.

The main job was just looking after myself, and I was good at that.  I made a point to trade canned food for local fresh food whenever possible, eggs, fish, turtle meat, bananas, coconuts. In that climate, scratches and insect bites often get infected and turn into nasty tropical ulcers, so I was meticulous with immediate application of iodine and bandaids. So I thrived, despite the conditions.

So, when on standby there was lots of time to spare. I bought a little dugout canoe for $10 and ten sticks of tobacco. Rigged it with a spritsail using a single bed sheet. Enjoyed sailing that little boat up and down the beach. Even sailed it way along the coast and into a big lagoon. When I got back to camp and told Bunii about it he said, “…Oh, BIG crocodile live in there…”  That little canoe only had a couple of inches of freeboard, so it would have been really easy for the croc to reach up and grab me – terrifying to think about it even now…. 

Speaking of crocs, this was a pet that I kept for awhile. Kept it in pen I made from a cut down fuel drum, and fed it on mudskippers. I used to stroke it’s back with my finger, and it really seemed to enjoy that. Then one time when I was stroking it with a twig instead of my finger, it whipped around and grabbed the twig and ripped it out of my hand. Sure glad that wasn’t my finger……..

I also had a young cuscus possum for awhile. Very cute, but not a good animal for a pet, cause they sleep all day and then crash around all night. So I turned it loose in the forest. When I told Bunii he was disappointed and said, “…im good fella kaikai (food) so he would have eaten it…”

 But after six wonderful months of peace and isolation, the company decided to take me off that isolated island cause they claimed that I might get troppo…… But the rea l reason was that this job was just too easy and I was too competant, so they wanted to send me to more difficult assignments, and boy, some of them sure were more challenging……..

 But that’s another story….

Figure 1The last view of my home on Kiwai Island

 

 

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The Spanish Mackerel that I caught on the way back to Port Moresby

 

Offshore Navigation Inc  - ONI

After leaving that fine job on Kiwai Island, I went to New Orleans to work from the headquarters of ONI. Flew to Los Angeles then rode a Greyhound bus to see the country on the way across. At the first lunch stop in southern California an immigration officer was carefully watching everyone as they got off. When I stepped down I saw a slight flash in his steely grey eyes, and he asked me where I was from. When I said Australia he looked very self-satisfied that he had picked up some small clue that I was different. Later saw him talking to a Mexican woman who was in tears…. Such is life for some over there….. L-o-n-g way across, then got to New Orleans just in time to see TV as John Glen stepped down on the moon. Checked in to the Lamplighter Motel where the company kept rooms open for employees in from the field.

Offshore Navigation Inc (ONI) was based in New Orleans, Louisiana. It’s business was to supply precision location services for the offshore oil industry. In those days before GPS that required setting up radio responding transmitters on known locations on land, and then the ship or drilling rig could measure the distances to each base station and thus determine their location even when out of sight of land.  This was essential because the geologists had to know exactly where the seismic survey vessel had been when it recorded a likely drill site.

The SHORAN equipment we used was originally designed and manufactured for precision bombing in WW2. It allowed bombers to fly in cloud and thus be hidden from enemy fighters and flak, and drop their bomb loads exactly on target. Before this, bombers had to fly in visual conditions to find their targets by eye, and even then accuracy was poor, and they were very vulnerable to enemy attack and loses were very high. If this equipment had been available earlier it could have probably have shortened the war.

When all that equipment was dumped on the surplus market, a couple of bright sparks in New Orleans realized the possibilities of adapting the system to use for accurately positioning seismic survey vessels working out of sight of land. Theory indicated that the range would be line of sight, thus limited at sea level, but they souped up the transmitters and discovered that previously unknown effects allowed the signal to curve over the horizon and be effective sometimes out to a hundred miles offshore. That equipment ran on vacuum tubes and old-fashioned analogue electronics, so I could understand it and make reasonable attempts to repair it when necessary. It was military quality so was very dependable, even when we boosted the voltage to get more range…..

It was a small company, with about 200 men in the field all over the world. It was a great company to work for. The bosses were all old field hands, so knew the challenges we met in the bush and backed us up as best they could. I was lucky in that I was ‘adopted’ by the South American manager so he used his influence to keep me in his area, rather than being sent to the Middle East or Nigeria (the ‘armpit of Africa’ as it was known in the company).…. Conditions on some of those base stations was hell, and not uncommon when someone got back to New Orleans (NOLA) after a bad job, to stomp into the office and declare “I quit…” When I’d done that once, the boss closed his office and took me to the Lamplighter Motel and bar, where our crews stayed when in NOLA. Of course that developed into a session of heavy drinking and story-telling and bull-shitting about wild jobs we’d been on, then next morning I’d find myself at the airport with a thick head and a ticket to another adventure somewhere, thinking “I thought I’d quit…….” But the work suited me just perfectly. I really enjoy adventure travel and this sure was the ultimate in adventure in remote places, from Alaska to the Amazon and from the North Sea to Papua New Guinea, locations that I’d never get to otherwise. The company didn’t realize it but they wouldn’t have had to pay me to go camping in such places….. I’m a real loner and prefer to work on my own, so this base station work was just perfect.

My next assignment was to Jamaica. That sounds like a pretty easy location, and it was nice and peaceful at the lighthouse where I was set up, but while down at the dock unloading equipment a wild knife fight took place right beside the ship…. Some very vicious gangs fighting for territory…..

Then for several years hopped around back and forth between Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru…. Almost got dizzy moving around so much and finding myself in yet another airport, maybe hung over and having to remember which way I was supposed to go next. It definitely was an adventure.

Offshore Seismic

This is how the offshore seismic system works. The ship motoring slowly along pre-determined lines and recording those reflected pulses. In those days before the airguns they used explosives, which was very impressive! One of these blasts every couple of minutes. The explosions were set off by a shot boat following alongside.

The explosions send shock waves down, which reflect off the sub-surface rock layers and the very faint echoes are picked up by the hydrophones in a mile-long cable trailed behind the ship.

 Then those faint reflections were recorded on some very sensitive and elaborate equipment in the recording room.

 Also need to know exactly where the ship was when the shot was made, and that’s where our work with ONI (Offshore Navigation Inc) comes in. We set up base stations with mobile transmitters on known survey locals on shore. The transmitter on board the ship sent out pulses that were returned by the base stations, and the time required for those pulses to return were turned into distances by the equipment. The on board ONI operator watched his dials and when they matched the pre-plotted location he would call “SHOT POINT, SHOT POINT.” At which point the shot boat would drop the explosive overboard and call, “CHARGE OVER”. The explosive was suspended by a balloon float and the firing cable played out as the boat moved on. When the shot boat was far enough away the operator called “FIRE”. The explosive went off, a thump from the shock wave hit the ship, and the recording equipment ran for about ten seconds while the echoes returned from the depths, then the operator shoved the canister with the record through a hatch into the dark room, where I was working in my first job in the industry. Then the process started all over again, every couple of minutes day and night. It was a very busy process involving a lot of men and equipment that all had to be coordinated exactly. Nowadays the shots are provided by high pressure airguns towed behind the ship, the data is now digital onto magnetic tape, and the navigation is GPS, so it’s much more automated and fewer men involved….. And no need at all for the base station operators like me who provided the radio signals for that navigation.

This is a floating drilling rig east of Trinidad. I positioned it by SATNAV.

 

 

 

To get on board the rig, I rode that basket that you see in the top of this photo. It was slung by a high speed crane, and the crane operator had to be very skilled to snatch the basket off that heaving deck at just the right moment and then quickly get it clear of the supply boat.

Quite a thrilling ride!

 

Base Stations

These are the Shoran base stations that I tended in Central and South America

To provide the navigation signal for the survey ship working offshore, we had to set up transmitters on a couple of known geodetic survey points. Those survey points were usually on the tops of mountains because that gave the original surveyors clear sight lines from one to the other to be able to triangulate the survey. They only needed to carry a theodolite up there, but we had to transport and set up about a ton of equipment….. The essential parts of that load to be able to provide the signal consisted of two heavy transmitters, two receivers, several tower sections, two elaborate yagi antennas and framework, a lot of coax cabling to hook it all together, block and tackle to pull the tower up, heaps of rope and stakes and sledge hammer to hold the tower up, a communications radio, spare parts, and two generators and fuel to power it all. And of course had to have shelter and food for the operator, including a tent, tarps, cot, sleeping bag, mosquito net, cooking stove, pots and pans, a whole bunch of canned food, water, and personal effects. Had to be self-sufficient out there for anything from a few days to several months.

Of course more altitude extends the range, and most surveyed bench marks are on the tops of mountains anyhow, so we had to spend a lot of effort lugging that equipment up mountains. The transmitters were square and heavy and awkward to handle, so we cursed them many times when trying to balance one on a horse’s packsaddle…. If there was a strong mule available then we could hang one on each side to balance the load….. Two men could carry one slung under a long pole, but then it swayed and made walking really difficult…. But those short, tough, South American Indians battled up those mountains without complaint, usually wearing nothing but homemade sandals on their feet…..

 If a helicopter was available then it was easy, but mostly in South America I had to use manpacking or mules (mules preferred).

 

 

All this was really hard work, but great adventure. I would start out from New Orleans with a map with an X on it, and a roll of cash. The best was when the equipment was already on the survey ship, so then we could (hopefully) just unload it and head for the bush. If a customs agent intervened then it was a matter of agreeing on a price for ‘special consideration’ (bribery). The word from the boss was, “Just be sure you pay the right man…” In other words pay the top man and not an underling, or you’ll have to pay yet again. Once you do pay the right man then he can make things go ahead. A couple of times I picked up Rayban gold-rimmed sunglasses when going through duty-free, and then laid them on his desk and watched his eyes focus on them, and I said, “You like??...” and then pushed them toward him. Once he had tried them on I knew I had him won….. One time I remember strolling past a bar after paying off the chief of customs, and he shouted out, “My friend, come in, come in!” then bought drinks and introduced me to the rest of his influential friends including the chief of police, so I was now known and protected by the right people in town. Of course he was wearing the new Raybans even though the bar was really dark…..

Then had to hire a truck and get some groceries and fuel and head for the location. Find the settlement closest to the destination and let it be known that I wanted to hire men with pack animals to get all my gear up that mountain. Easiest was to hire an influential head man and let him pick the crew and deal with them.  The company figured on US$5 a day for each man with a packhorse or mule, which was generous for that time; the local wages were more like 1-2 dollars a day. If I contracted a boss man to organize it all, and paid him the $5 for each man, I knew that he would pay each man only the minimum dollar or two that he could get away with and pocket the rest himself. Being idealistic, I wanted to hire the men myself and then pay them the full $5, but that often got pretty chaotic….. My Spanish was very basic but I still managed to negotiate many labour agreements, with great difficulty….. Then, even if I used a head man, often there’d be a strike halfway up the mountain and a demand for more pay or they’d leave the gear right there and go back down….. So I learned to first agree for $3, and keep $2 aside to buy my way out of the later demand…. All very confusing and stressful, but such is business in those parts.  I realized that if I was in their situation, I’d also be pushing for all I could get from this gringo with a load of exotic equipment and a pocket full of money, in a local economy that had no other opportunities for cash windfall, and $2 to them was a windfall…… And of course this was the land of ‘mañana’ (tomorrow) so they didn’t understand the urgency, whereas those Texan companies I was working for demanded NOW IF NOT SOONER, so the pressure was on…..

So we made an agreement and loaded up, with lots of arguing who gets which loads, etc, etc…., all the while time slipping away…… Finally on the track and then the issue of trying to keep probably 15 men and animals together so that I could keep an eye of any attempts to pilfer goods. So I had to follow last so that someone couldn’t drop behind and have time to dig through my stuff. Meanwhile someone up front could speed on ahead to get out of sight so that they could hide something to pick up later on the way down. This was sometimes a real hassle, especially with manpacking, mule skinners seemed to be more honest……  Duffle bags full of top quality rope were really tempting for anyone working with animals, but if lost then I wouldn’t be able to secure the tower. And of course canned food was very tempting to folk who probably lived on a very boring diet of local produce…..

They always seemed to think the gringo should ride a horse, even if all of the others walked and lead animals. I’m not a comfortable horseman, and the saddle was often lumpy and hard, and I have no padding at all on my skinny butt, so it was painful blisters right away. The horses were usually in poor condition and not strong, so they stumbled and lurched, making it an even rougher ride….. I much preferred a mule to ride if I could get one, because they have remarkably steady footing even on rough ground, and just amble along like a rocking chair.  And the condition of the trails was often bad. I remember one in Ecuador, where the trail went up along a narrow ridge, but constant use for a couple of hundred years had eroded the ground and then water started running down the track, until it was now a creek in a gulley deeper than head height , with slippery muddy boulders all accumulated in the bottom. It was absolute hell for the horses, stumbling and bashing their fetlocks on the rocks. I dismounted and walked up beside the gully, but the locals just beat the horses mercilessly as they struggled down there. It was really sad to see that lack of consideration for their animals, but was common throughout those countries…..

Get to the top and try to quickly check my gear to see that all was there, then pay them off and send them down. I was supposed to hire one man to live in camp as a helper and in case of emergency, but I wanted my privacy, so as soon as the heavy work of setting up the camp was finished I arranged for him to just come up every couple of days with a jerry can of water.

Then the bliss of base station life began….. I love being on my own with no one to interrupt my thoughts. Now there was time to look around and enjoy the new surroundings, and adjust the camp to suit the conditions. I love living in such bush camps, and the company wouldn’t have had to pay me to do this….. Now the boss was many miles away with only a radio for communication, and if I didn’t want to hear what he was saying, I’d just claim, “…bad reception can’t copy….”

The important thing was to keep my generator running and the equipment functioning 24/7.  The generators were little Briggs and Strattons, running nearly full throttle all the time, so needed some attention. The strict rule was to change oil every six hours. The oil wasn’t worn out, but those little engines ran pretty hot and once they started to burn oil it could go dry quickly. We had two, so could switch from one to the other to change oil and let the other one cool down. If a generator stopped and we lost signal for more than a five minutes the ship would have to turn around  and backtrack, costing thousands of dollars in lost production, so the pressure was on…..  Always had the spare generator fueled up and ready to go, and slept with one ear open so at the least hesitation in the note of the engine could leap up and fight my way out from under the mosquito net and dash to the generators and fire up the spare. This got to be such a conditioned response that I remember one night in a motel after finishing a job when the power went off and the noisy airconditioner stopped and I leapt out of bed and staggered around before I realized that I didn’t need to respond this time…… The local fuel was sometimes bad and caused carbon fouling, so frequently had to pull the head and scrape clean. Got so practiced that this only took a few minutes.

The company put no budget on groceries, but in many places the only things available were a bag of rice, a case of corned beef, a case of canned fish, a bag of corn meal, maybe a bag of flour, maybe some jam, and usually a big tin of soda crackers. I sure ate a lot of tuna and rice, but that’s a good diet for health.  That sounds pretty bland and boring, but I did find ways to improve on it. Usually tried to carry some curry powder and Tabasco with me, because not usually available locally. The soda crackers were good for trading for local eggs or meat. Corned beef was very popular for trading, which leads into another story…..

Lobster for dinner

I had been dropped off by helicopter on Miskito Cay, off Nicaragua. It was late in the day, and just enough time to set up the tent, but the supplies all a jumble, and dinner was going to be a can of cold corned beef and soda crackers…… Then a dory motored into the lagoon and up to the beach. Went down and met them and found out that they were lobster divers from Corn Island, and I knew family members from there. I asked what they were having for dinner, and they said lobster, in a tone of voice that that said they were sick of eating lobster all the time. So I made a deal to trade a couple of cans of corned beef for a share of their lobster meal. They thought that was a good deal. One of them broke open a coconut and grated the meat, then squeezed out the milk through a piece of cloth, and then cooked the lobster in this coconut milk. Then did a second washing of the grated coconut and cooked the rice in that water. He got out some pepper corns and crushed them with a hatchet, and added them to the lobster. I found a jar of tomato paste and they added that. All was cooked in big metal fishing floats cut in half to make cooking pots. It was the very best lobster in coconut meal I’ve ever had, and I ate most of it, while they ripped the tops of the greasy corned beef and ate it cold….. Different strokes for different folks…..

Folks keep asking, what about snakes and dangerous animals?? Well, the dangerous animals are humans, but that’s another story….. Of course there are snakes through all that country, but you just have to take some precautions, and ‘live and let live’  Like, keep aware that they like to hide in dark places and under anything lying on the ground, so don’t reach into dark places or suddenly pick up something without standing clear…… I’ve come across plenty of snakes right in the tent, but just keep calm and give them a chance to move away, cause they don’t want to be close to me either, cause to them I’m a big threatening giant….  If you surprise one when you’re too close, just freeze and don’t twitch a muscle. They react to movement and if you move quickly they see that as an attack and strike to defend themselves. It takes courage, but I’ve done this when I’ve surprised one and it was alarmed and ready to strike, but after a long suspenseful wait in that frozen pose, it relaxed and just slithered over my foot on it’s way to get away. Of course don’t ever try to kill a snake, that’s when most bites occur, like when I grabbed one by the neck, but that’s another story….  These precautions became so engrained that years later when I was living on a boat where there wouldn’t be any snakes, I still couldn’t force my hand to reach into a dark storage locker until I’d shone a light in there…..

The real pests in those places are biting bugs of all sorts, the smaller the more of a nuisance. The worst I remember was on a station along the Nicaragua coast. It was just before the wet season, so hot and still and very humid. And a scourge of sand flies, midges, no-see-ums, call them whatever. Hordes of them all day and night….. Soon was itching all over, and scratching the itch lead to infections….. The usual repellents soon washed off with the pouring sweat…. The local camp helper covered himself with my engine oil, so you can see how desperate he was….. The bugs were so tiny that they came right through my mosquito net, so at night I had to keep a sheet right over my head, so in that humid heat it was stifling under there….. I still squirm when I remember those nights…..

If there were cattle around, then lots of horse flies, deer flies, march flies, call them whatever, but they all give a painful bite….. Luckily they’re heavy-footed so you feel them land, and slow to take off so easy to swat, but often there were hundreds more clinging to the inside of the tent, just waiting for a chance to attack, so I couldn’t relax….. I found that I could link several rubber bands together, with a big knot at the end, and that was a great weapon for shooting the flies sitting on the tent. Lots of free time and nothing else to do, so the floor was soon littered with pieces of shattered flies, but of course more coming all the time….. One station had a delta-wing fly that the locals called a ‘Doctor Fly’, and that one was particularly cunning and quick to zoom in and take a bite and go away to chew on it…. I did want to start a collection of ‘Bugs that had Bitten me’, but problems of mounting and preservation ruled that out.

On one station on a gravelly ridge in Nicaragua, there would be dozens of scorpions and a couple of tarantulas scampering around the floor at night, hunting the insects that were attracted to the light. I got stung twice by scorpions at that place. The sting was instantly incredibly painful, and felt like an electric wire piercing the skin and buzzing like an alternating current. The first time it was a bit concerning, cause I was far away from any treatment and didn’t know how serious the repercussions were liable to be. Nothing I could do so just sat down and observed, and like snake bite it’s important to keep calm and don’t boost circulation. It hurt like hell for an hour, then suddenly went away altogether, with no after effects….. Actually it was a somewhat refreshing feeling afterward ….strange….. The next sting was the same, so I guess those particular scorpions aren’t dangerous, but boy they sure do get your attention…. At that same camp I once reached up for my hat hung on the tent pole without looking first, and grabbed a hairy tarantula that pretty much filled my hand. Luckily I had it by the back so it couldn’t get it’s fangs into me, and of course I instantly flung it away, but that sure is a way to wake up in a hurry…. I collected a scorpion that fit in a matchbox and a tarantula that with it’s legs folded  fit into a large tape tin, but no use trying to get them through quarantine back home…. Should have taken more photos…..

 

Army Ants!

The biggest misadventure with bugs was the night I was invaded by army ants!  I had arrived at this location in the Amazon basin late in the day, and had to quickly put up the tent and set up the equipment and the cot and mosquito net.  This was the SatNav equipment so I had to wake up several times every night to tune in to a satellite signal, so set the cot right beside the receiver so that I could work the controls through the net. When I woke up later in the middle of the night and turned on the flashlight, I found that the equipment and the net were completely covered by army ants!  It looked and felt just like this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UozWJTuhbMQ

 

And these are the ants. Massive mandibles that can chop up anything.  I’d heard of their reputation of devouring everything in their path, but never encountered them before.   Now this was a truly frightening situation! It was totally dark outside and thick bush all around, so I didn’t want to take the chance of running. Just to open the net and step out was going to be immediately covered by them….. The net seemed to be well enough tucked in that there were none getting inside, so I decided to stay put. For the rest of the night carefully kept still on the cot to keep from disrupting the net, and listened to them scampering all over everything…… Not much sleep that night….. In the morning I could finally see the situation. They’d discovered a box of dried wild pig that I had set on top of the stack of equipment, and were busy chopping it up and carrying it away. The side of the net away from the equipment was clear, so I could get out that side and get hold of a can insect spray from my toolbox. The spray devastated them and I’d soon fought them back, only getting a few bites as they clamped their mandibles onto anything as they died. It wasn’t a sting, just a bite, but still hurt, and had to pluck the mandibles out of my skin….  It turned out that I was camped right next to their nest, and they weren’t actually on the march. They’d already carried away most of that dried pig so I threw the rest onto their nest to keep them occupied there.  Then moved the camp farther away

Now then, the humans were a whole different story….. Mostly pretty good, and just a nuisance for curiosity when they would show up to have a look at this gringo and all that strange equipment. They’d stand around and just peer at it all and at me, and whisper to each other. My language skill wasn’t sufficient to have an interesting conversation, so it was all very basic and pretty tedious…. Couldn’t really shoo them away cause after all this was their neighbourhood…. Sometimes could see that a fella was casing the joint for what he might be able to come back and steal….

Banditos!

I never carried a gun on any of my travels and never wished I had one….. Then on one station in Colombia, a swarthy character with a big pistol in his belt, and his offsider with a shotgun and a band of ammo over his shoulder, rode into camp, just like in the western movies….. He claimed that some of his cattle were missing because the crew that had carried my gear up there had left a gate open when they went back down, and he demanded compensation. I doubted that very much because I’d cautioned the crew about closing gates and they were a good crew and agreed. He was the local bandido and this was just an attempt at extortion…. Then he eyed the generator, and said how good it would be to have lights, and how good quality the rope was, and how good the tent was…..  His demeanour indicated that he was an arrogant ruthless pig, in complete control of the situation….. Sure glad I didn’t have a gun in that situation, would‘ve just been a bad way to get killed or at the very least have it stolen….. This was getting serious…..   I was kinda worried until I remembered what a canny old operator had told me about the time a local bandido was preventing them from salvaging a crashed helicopter, so he hired the bandido to supervise the job. So I claimed to this guy that we would be coming back many times in the future, and needed a boss man who could protect us and arrange transport up and down each time, and we’d pay him $5 a day per man. Of course he’d bully the men he hired and probably pay them $1 a day if that, so it would be a lucrative business for him. I explained that I couldn’t give him a generator because I would need it on my next station, but I could give him a bunch of extra rope that I had and a couple of tarps and any fuel and food left over. That satisfied him, and when I left he arranged the transport down, and when I handed over  the US cash he was thrilled and called me his good friend and said next time just send word for him and he would look after everything and protect me…. 

 

 

At this camp on Corn Island, off Nicaragua, it was the rainy season so it rained for 30 days and 30 nights. Fortunately, those tents were really waterproof.

But from going to the generator tent I got wet, and all my clothes were damp and moldy…… 

Drying out after all that wet weather...

During that ‘wet’ I got a bad chest infection, which must have been pretty close to pneumonia. Really needed antibiotics but for some reason I didn’t have any with me at that time. No flights to the island due to the weather, and no medical clinic, so I asked my camp helper to see if he could find any antibiotics. He came back with three tablets, all different shapes and mottled with age, that’s all he could find on the island….. So, like the islanders I just did without, and survived….

 

On a station way back in the hills along the Colombian coast, when I sorted out the gear, a vital coax cable was missing, so that I couldn’t connect to the antenna…. So I powered up the communication radio to tell the party chief to rush me another cable. But when I switched the radio on there was a sizzle and a flash and a stinky smoke emerged….  It turned out that a lizard had crawled inside and got fried by a high voltage, and in so doing burned out a critical potentiometer and a couple of other components. That potentiometer was vital for fine tuning the single-sideband signal, so I didn’t have contact with the ship or the party chief in the city. It looked hopeless, but now my most valuable skill came to the fore – improvisation…… Now this has to get a bit technical to be able to explain how clever this was….. I worked out that another potentiometer was always set to the same setting, and in the spares kit for the SHORAN were a bunch of resisters that I could hook up in series and take a tap off at a suitable point to replace that pot. Then replaced the burned pot with the good one, and ‘borrowed’ a couple of other components from other sections, and I was on the air again.

Got in touch with the party chief so he could start out right away with another cable. Felt really satisfied with that recovery that saved a couple of days…... It would have taken a day to walk out to a telephone to call the party chief and another day to get a replacement radio and coax cable back in. All the while that Texan ‘get it done right now crew’ on the ship would be fuming because they couldn’t start working without a signal…. Felt really satisfied with that recovery that saved a couple of days…...

Working one that communications radio.

Working on a generator.

 

Drying meat to make jerky

 

 

The Spanish Main

Utila Island was a really interesting place. It’s part of Spanish-speaking Honduras and only 20 miles from La Ceiba, but English with a distinctive Jamacan lilt is their language. It was settled in the 1800’s, mostly by escaped slaves from the British Cayman Islands and Jamaica, and descendants of pirates. A small population, fairly conservative and a protestant church-going culture. Lots of judgemental gossip in that small community, so the men speak of going over to the ‘Spanish Main’ to go on a drinking and whoring party, away from prying eyes. That’s when I learned what the term ‘Spanish Main’ really means – it refers to the mainland of Central America, held by the Spanish, not the ocean as in “…sailing the Spanish Main…”. The British and the pirates held most of the Caribbean islands and thus referred to the mainland as the ‘Spanish Main’. Another novel habit that showed the Utila islanders as descendants of the pirates was that they still call a machete a ‘cutlass’. They use US dollar currency a lot rather than the Honduran Limpera, and call it ‘Dollar Gold’. They get the dollars from the men going to work as merchant seamen on American ships.

As is so common in isolated communities, there were a couple of strong factions and feuds between families. This feud had been violent in the past, with someone’s grandmother thrown head first down a well, so such actions are never forgiven…. The man I had as camp helper to get the equipment up on the mountain was in the other faction and always carried a rusty .32 cal pistol in his pocket (so rusty in fact that it wouldn’t fire when he tried to demonstrate it)….. When we got to the top of the mountain, it was covered with tall, dry grass, which he spent a whole day cutting back to bare soil with his ‘cutlass’. Fortunately he had done that job well because next day a fire started upwind that sent the fire raging up the slope. It would have wiped out my camp if he hadn’t done the clearing. Rumour was that the fire had been started by enemies of his who were jealous of him getting the paid job with me….

So you’d think that an isolated tropical island, with a small population who all knew each other for generations, would be a peaceful paradise, but not at all…..

 

Along the Miskito Coast

I did quite a bit of work along that east coast of Nicaragua, known as the Miskito Coast. Often erroneously spelled mosquito coast (as in the insect), but really it’s named after the Miskito Indians who have lived there for eons. It was also settled by escaped slaves from the British Caribbean islands, so their preferred language is still English. British and Dutch privateers who preyed on Spanish ships often found refuge along this coast. There’s no valuable resources there so no nation invested the power to control the area. It bounced back and force between British and Spanish control several times, and even the USA was involved at one point. Finally it became part of Nicaragua, but the central government ignores the area because it’s a long way from Managua over difficult mountain terrain and not much there to exploit… So not much development and the locals are rightly dissatisfied…. One old activist whom I met had even written the President of the USA requesting to be annexed….

 But good friendly English speaking locals, and I enjoyed my times there. It’s along that coast that I had that excellent lobster dinner on the Miskito Cay (but also got bitten by those scorpions at a different station).

 Corn Island is accessed from Blue Fields the main town on the coast, with the same English speaking people. Pirates had used it as a base long ago so lots of stories about the possibility of buried treasure. And of course intrigue…. An American had set up a lobster processing plant and freezing works on the island, and when it became a successful business he was found dead, shot through the head with a heavy rifle…. The police claimed suicide, but then a member of the president’s inner circle took over the business…. Another couple of secretive Americans kept a couple of ex-navy PT boats, those very powerful, high speed attack boats, based there. Supposedly to transport live lobsters to market quickly, but those boats would have been extremely costly to run, so what were they really running??? So once again, a fascinating history and ongoing mysteries….

Venezuela

In 1970 I was working in Tucupita Venezuela.  Tucupita is in the swamp of the Orinoco River delta, established to cater for a big land reclamation project to drain an area of that swamp for agricultural use, and was the closest town to the coast at that point.  I was working for Offshore Navigation Inc, the provider of precision navigation services for a seismic ship working offshore.  In those days before GPS, that needed three base stations with transmitters onshore on known surveyed positions, from which the ship could triangulate it’s position. On this job, those base stations were positioned with satellite navigation along the waterfront of that enormous delta, built on high platforms above the swamp.

My job was to manage those stations and keep them supplied.

 

Lots of muddy water in that enormous swamp.

 This is the sort of place that geographic expeditions would spend years planning and equipping, but we were a bunch of loco gringos, afraid of nothing and ignorant of what we were headed into. But lots of experience in many equally remote places had taught us that everywhere is somone’s stomping ground. If you approach the locals and respect their knowledge, they will have the means and knowhow to move you through their country. Of course, a roll of US$ works wonders everywhere…..

 

Transferring fuel in the swamp.

We only had a small helicopter (Hiller UH-12A) on floats contracted for that job, so I spent many hours choppering over that swamp.

 It didn’t have enough fuel range to reach the stations so we often had to land in the swamp and transfer some jerrycans of fuel. 

No working radio in the aircraft, and no real flight planning so that someone would know where to start looking for us in case we didn’t arrive…. In retrospect not wise at all….  The only other aircraft based at Tucupita were Mexican crop sprayers, and no other helicopters anywhere nearby, so if we went down in that swamp we’d be there for days before rescue……  By the time they found us the mosquitoes would have sucked us dry…..  Not much in the way of survival equipment carried. On this flight it looks like lots of soda crackers for the station, no shortage of water in the swamp. Pretty careless, but that’s the gung-ho way we did things in the oil exploration industry in those days….. If we’d followed all the rules we wouldn’t have been able to get the job done at all…..

 

 

Not a good place to be flying in this fading light

.

            

But the pilot knew about an isolated sawmill, the only habitation anywhere out there. We had to spend the night there due to too late to make it back to base. A fine old fellow owned it, so we had excellent hospitality. He really liked the isolation out there. Surprisingly didn’t need a mosquito net there because it’s what they call a ‘black water’ river. That’s due to the natural tannin in the water that kills the mosquito larva.

The isolated sawmill.

It must be very fertile families there, judging by the number of children…..

No TV of course….

 

 

A flock of Scarlet Ibis add some colour to the swamp.

 Nowhere to land....

When the engine did fail we had just taken off from base and were still over the very last corn field before the swamp….. 

Luck

 the 

We had been climbing out normally when there was a slight change in the pitch of the engine. I looked over at the pilot and he just shrugged….. Then the revs really dropped and a sputtering roar from the engine, and when he went instantly to autorotation we suddenly dropped alarmingly for about a hundred feet then stabilized into an autorotation descent. He wiggled and waggled the controls then said, “No problem…”  We were fully loaded (overloaded more likely) so it was a difficult landing in autorotation without power, but he got it pretty right.

 

Here the pilot is looking for the cause. It turned out that one cylinder had broken off at the base, and when it pushed out it broke the intake manifold away from the other two cylinders on that side, so they also lost power…..  We sure were glad that didn’t happen somewhere out over that swamp…..

Just before the whole job was finished, a crop duster pilot was practicing water landings in the helicopter when the tail rotor hit the water and fractured….. They left the chopper tied up to the bank while they went for parts.  When they went back next morning, one of the floats had leaked and the machine was upside down in the water…. Now we had no helicopter to use for clearing away the base stations.

So I had to hire a big dugout canoe with an outboard and several drums of fuel, and head down the river…. It took two days of threading our way through all the channels to get to the coast, sleeping on board. We loaded all the equipment from the station, and then to get the next base station we decided to take a shortcut by going offshore along the coast rather than back through the channels which would have taken another couple of days – bad mistake…. The wind came up and blew hard, making a rough swell. The water was shallow for a long way offshore, so the waves were often breaking and flooding the canoe….. The canoe was heavily loaded, and the driver kept turning broadside to the waves because he was afraid that if he went straight up a wave the canoe might break it’s back!  Those canoes were built for the calm waterways and  weren’t meant for rough water. We bailed like heck but it was hard to keep up. Of course no life jackets, so I selected an empty jerrycan and kept a hold of it in case we got totally swamped…. It was a long way to the shore, and that muddy water was home to a lot of hungry sharks amd crocodiles….. And even if we got ashore, there would be no fresh water…. And no one knew we had decided to go this way so wouldn’t know where to look….. That was a terrifying trip and I shudder to remember it…..

The canoe I used to make that move.

When we first set up those base stations, we had transported all the equipment from Trinidad by the survey boat and ferried it ashore. I also came ashore from the ship and then rode the helicopter to Tucupita, so I didn’t go through any immigration check, so I was illegally in the country. That meant that I couldn’t leave through an international airport where they would discover that I hadn’t entered legally….. I hadn’t considered the implications when I landed, but it was now critical that I got on that ship. I’d been in the country for several months and no one ever questioned me, but if I had been in an accident or some confrontation that involved the police it could have been complicated….. The local customs and immigration officers were staying in the same little motel, and we often socialized. I don’t think they realized my status.  At Christmas time I went out and bought a big bottle of the best Venezuelan rum for each of them and the chief of police. Venezuela made excellent rum and I thought I’d done something special, until I found out that Venezuelans of stature shun their local rum and prefer imported whiskey for the prestige…..

Not long after Christmas, when we were on a helicopter flight to a station, we spotted a big dugout canoe with twin outboards arriving from offshore into a remote lagoon. We needed a good canoe like that to move some equipment so landed nearby to see if we could hire it. They were very tense and hostile as we approached, because it turned out that they were smugglers with a load of 40 cases of whiskey! But the pilot quickly assured them that we weren’t the authorities, and all he wanted was a case of whiskey at the right price, so of course they obliged, fearing that he could report them. Then back in town he was gifting everyone, including the customs man, with Johnny Walker Black Label….

Another time we needed a replacement radio that was on the ship. The constant onshore wind made it too rough on the Venezuelan side to get it ashore by dinghy, so the ship sheltered in a bay across the strait on the south side of Trinidad while we flew across in the chopper. Then they loaded the radio in a dinghy and with me sitting astride the float of the chopper prepared to handover. There was a gentle swell running so the chopper couldn’t land on the water, so we were hovering above the dinghy which was rising and falling with the swell and the pilot trying to coordinate with the movement, and the rotorblast was sending the flat-bottomed dinghy skittering sideways. A man in the dinghy was holding the heavy radio box above his head and I was reaching down as far as I could, while everything surged up and down. Finally coincided and I got hold for the handle and heaved the radio up unto the float. In doing any handover like that it’s very important that the receiver be really positive when taking hold, so I really heaved it up, such that the man in the dinghy lost his balance and fell in a heap. A very risky maneuver that could have gone very wrong for all concerned, but it’s a great feeling to successfully pull off a challenge like that ….  Also totally illegal since the chopper wasn’t supposed to be in Trinidad airspace and the radio wasn’t supposed to arrive in Venezuela without clearance, but those were the freedoms that we took then.  If we’d always followed the rules exactly we couldn’t have got much done, and had no such ‘fun’…..

Some fairly wild and rugged characters out on some of those base stations. Better qualified and sober technicians couldn’t stand such uncomfortable and often downright miserable conditions so we were stuck with these wild men. Some were on the run from wives and ‘civilized’ society, and preferred the wild bars and brothels in such places where they could go berserk. When Brian was sober he was an great character, if a bit crazy, but an excellent base station operator, able to fix anything, endure the conditions, and afraid of nothing. He was an expert on birds and snakes and this was an excellent chance to study such wildlife in remote places. But he was an addicted alcoholic who went all to pieces when he got on the booze. So we put him on the most remote station, way out at the mouth of the Orinoco River where there were no villages at all. When we were loading his supplies, he dropped a heavy duffle bag with a shattering sound and then it leaked rum…… Turns out it was full of bottles….. So we sent him out without his booze and all was well for a few weeks. Then he called in by radio that he was having problems with both his generators and sounded very confused. So I had a long helicopter flight out there, only to find chaos…. He was alcohol saturated and totally useless….  It turned out that the big ships going up the river to the iron mines picked up the river pilots near there, and it was a tradition that the captains gifted the river pilots with bottles of duty-free alcohol, which he was able to buy from them. I fixed up his equipment and convinced him to let me remove the rest of his booze when I pointed out that his job depended upon it… All went well for a couple of weeks before he lost it again, and we had to fly out another operator and inform him that he had to report back to head office in New Orleans. It was sad that he knew this was the end of this career that he loved so much, and he would also know that he was too wild and erratic to be confined in a normal job…. We really tried to look after such characters but he had become too much of a liability….

That’s a photo of him at his best. Look at that pipeline that he’d improvised from empty oil cans clipped together. He’s collecting rainwater off the tent for bathing and cooling off in that barrel. That’s the sort of improvisation that’s valuable in such a situation. No way that we could carry all that water by helicopter.

 

An old hand ONI supervisor told me about when they were working in Mexico, how he handled such wild ones. They were working with a drilling rig that only needed the navigation signal for several days at a time when it was moving to a new location and then not for another couple of weeks. So between those times the supervisor brought his men into town where they often went wild for days at a time and forgot to check in when it was time to go back to work. So a couple of days before he would need them again, he bribed the local chief of police to round them up from whatever brothel they were crashed in and put them in jail to dry out and be on hand ready for work again. Very clever!

Each station had a local man employed as a helper. Then I got a call from one operator who couldn’t stand his helper any longer. It seemed that the guy would open a gasoline drum and sniff the vapour, then wail and scream all night in hallucinations….. That platform was a small place to be confined with such a problem, so we sent the chopper out with a replacement. All in the life of this job….

In those days, 1970’s, Venezuela was a thriving and prosperous country, with energetic and positive people with a good future. Lots of oil revenue seemed to share around pretty well, so a pretty good standard of living for all. I could easily have settled there. I realize that corruption and disparity got pretty bad later, but it’s really sad to hear what the socialists have done, and disrupted the economy such that now in 2019 no one has anything…..

Tucupita was quite an exotic town, with sloths hanging in the trees in the park in town.

 As a boom town, it was full of workers from all over the country, come to work in the construction and farming.  There was a large restaurant, more of an eating hall, where the workers came for dinner.  In that culture, the mid-day meal is the big one, and the restaurant laid on really great food for the hungry men.  They were a hearty, good humored, boisterous lot, and I really looked forward to the meal there every day.  So, as I headed downtown on Christmas day I was anticipating an extra good session.  But the usually bustling streets were eerily quiet, deserted in fact....  And the restaurant was closed tight....  It turned out that the workers had gone home to their families all over the country, and the restaurant owner closed the doors to have Christmas dinner with his family.  Not even a corner store open.  So I had to go back to the little motel, feeling somewhat disappointed, and hungry....  Luckily I had some supplies left over from supplying the remote base stations.  Found a can of tuna and some dry crackers, and with some milk in the fridge and a couple of bananas from a nearby tree, that would be it.....  

So, a memorable Christmas dinner 1970.....

 

 

But I made up for it at New Years dinner.  We were coming back from re-supplying a base station with the helicopter, when we spotted a litter of wild pigs in a nice open clear area.  The piglets were just the right size for roast suckling pig.  So I was soon straddled the helicopter float like riding a horse, while the pilot flew dizzying maneuvers at grass-top level, chasing the zig-zagging pigs.  I had a machete, and finally managed to hit one.  Loaded it onto the chopper then headed off again.  But the pilot reckoned we needed a capybara (a large rodent sort of like a beaver without tail) to complete the meal, so we were soon hovering low over a swamp where we had seen some swimming.  Once again I was out on the float, and when one came up for air I nailed it with the machete.  Back in town, the helicopter mechanic cleaned and prepared them with his secret spicy marinade, and we took them to the bakery.  There's a custom there, that after the baker has done his bread, he uses the remaining heat in the wood-fired brick oven to roast meat for customers who don't have ovens.  Both suckling pig and capybara are tender, luscious meat, and with the spicy sauce it was exquisite!  That was the very best roast meal I have ever had! So, another memorable meal, well earned this time.

New Years dinner killed by machete.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

These big ships go all the way upriver to the iron mines.

Loading essential supplies (Pepsi)

 On a river barge.   

The local parking lot. These canoes are the pickup trucks of the river.

Summer in Alaska

I had worked mostly in Central and South America for a couple of years, without a single day off. Then I was in New Orleans with a few days gap til the next assignment, so took the chance for a quick visit to my folks in Canada, at least that was the plan…. But in the airport in Vancouver I was paged to call the boss. He asked if I could change plans and head on to Alaska for a short time because they were short-handed there. I should have known better, but I believed him that it would be a short job…..I hadn’t wanted to work in Alaska because I preferred the tropics, but now was on a flight to Anchorage ….…

Finally flew out to Kotzebue and then helicopter over to a site in the Bering Land Bridge Wildlife Preserve. Set up the station and then sat there for several days waiting for the survey ship to arrive. A beautiful pristine landscape, and a sense of real history because it would have been over this very ground that some of the early native settlers crossed the then land bridge from Asia and populated the American continent.

Camping in Alaska sure was different from South America, and not only the weather….. Issued with a heavy parka and sleeping bag, and a powerful rifle that we were required to keep ready in case of grizzly bears…. Of course we had to be very careful with garbage to keep from attracting the bears, and the rules in that wildlife preserve also required that everything had to be removed from the site when we left. Our gasoline came in 5 gallon tin cans, and I figured out a way to cut the top such that it could be bent up and cut an air hole low in the side. Then put in the food scraps covered with used engine oil from the generator. Then set it up with the air hole facing the strong wind and light the oil. “The flames just soared and the furnace roared, such a blaze you seldom see….”. The can glowed red and cremated those scraps such that nothing remained but a bit of ash.  Didn’t have any trouble with bears….

The survey ship never did come so the job was cancelled and I headed back to Anchorage. Then still couldn’t go to home because was needed on another job right up on the north coast. First at Demarcation Point, right where the US and Canadian border reached the sea. The only notable memory of this site was the gulley that ran across the border into Canada. I went down in there to get out of the cold wind for my morning crap, and considered that I was paying my taxes in Canada…..

It was funny watching big burly oil workers lining up to catch helicopters to various work sites, each crutching his sleeping bag like so many kids with their teddy bears. This was because they were liable to get stranded out by fog, and that sleeping bag would be a saviour….. In the tropics I always carried a mosquito net the same way, just in case of stranding …..

The next assignment was at Oliktok Point, and that is a story in itself, as you will see.…..

 

Oliktok,  North Slope Alaska

Can’t get much farther north than this……

 Oliktok was the site of a DEW Line radar station. Distant Early Warning, watching for Soviet bombers during the cold war

This is how it looked in winter.

Our base station was set up near the beach about a mile from the DEW Line station. That seemed like a nice secure site not far from an established facility. It turned out that we were very fortunate to have that facility so close, when a violent storm wiped out our camp….. That storm on 13 September 1970 is noted  here by the USGS as a one in a hundred year event, with winds of 80km/hr recorded at the station, and the storm surge reaching far inland.

 Securing a tent and tower on that permafrost is a challenge. We had heavy steel angle iron stakes and a heavy sledge hammer, but no way can you drive anything into that frozen ground. There’s a thawed layer on top that’s all mushy then below that it’s like concrete…. Several towers had collapsed because the operators only drove the stakes into the thawed layer.  I worked out a way to get those stakes well down into that permafrost. Drive it as far as it’ll go, then leave it for a couple of hours, then go around again and give each stake another whack and will be able to drive it another inch because the steel has conducted enough warmth down to melt a bit. Keep going around and around like that until the stake freezes in solid, and then no way you can get it out again. So my tent and tower were well anchored as the storm proved later…….

 

On that day the wind kept blowing harder and harder, such that dozens of empty 44gal drums  kept rolling along the beach like tumble weeds, and floating across the lagoon upwind of camp and then colliding into the tent, so we had to keep fending them off.  The beach was only slightly above sea level, so when the wind-driven sea rose enough to cover the sand it was to be expected. I set my generators up on empty crates and in the tent we set our belongings up off the ground, and sloshed around in that icy water.

We should have left then and sheltered in the DEW Line station, but I was concerned for the survey ship out in the sea. It was a rusty old Mexican motor barge, and I sure wouldn’t have wanted to be out there in those conditions…. The last they broadcast on the radio said they had stopped working and were seeking shelter behind a very low-lying sand bar, using the navigation signal that we provided to find their way. My equipment gave a constant series of beeps when the ship was using the signal, and those beeps kept coming, so I didn’t want to shut down my generator in case they were depending upon it. I kept calling and calling them, but no answer, so I thought I’d better keep the signal on for them……

It was getting late in the day but looked like we could manage the night in that condition. Then a wall of water a couple of feet high swept up out of the lagoon and caved in the side of the tent and washed the generator off it’s crate so it went silent….. It turned out that the causeway out to the wharf at the point had been blocking the storm surge, then collapsed and released that surge of water that washed us out. Now the situation had drastically changed and we had a dilemma…. What to do?? Our beds were under water, so we considered perching on top of the transmitters for the night. The tent was holding up well, but if it collapsed in the night we wouldn’t have a chance……  So we decided to head for the DEW Line station….

The entire area was now flooded knee-deep all the way to the station. That tundra country is very rough, all hummocks and holes. It’s bad enough footing at the best of times but was now all under muddy water so we couldn’t see what was there. The water was so cold that there was ice floating in it, so our feet were as numb as posts, and couldn’t feel what we were stepping on. So we were constantly stumbling and floundering and falling. Tom had brought along his treasured mountain climbing ice axe, and holding that between us we could pull each other up after a fall. Very slow progress and totally exhausting……  Blasted with the wind-driven spray in the fading light sometimes got confused and turned around….. At one point I do remember briefly thinking we weren’t going to make it, but going down with my boots on in a battle with the elements would be better than other alternatives, then just pushed on….. Eventually found a 44gal drum mounted high on a steel post, and noticed a line of these marking the approach to the runway. Once we found them, and struggled from one to the next, we had markers that showed progress in the right direction and kept us going….. Luckily Tom was fit and strong and I have good endurance so we dragged each other along…. Until we got near the end of the runway…. And there was a group of men from the station who had seen our predicament…. They were waving and shouting at us but we couldn’t hear them in that wind, and we just wanted to get to the solid ground of that runway so we kept going….. Then we stepped off into really deep water where construction had dredged up to build the runway…. That’s why they were trying to warn us not proceed any farther…. The shock of that cold water flooding up inside my parka and around my chest was daunting, I still gasp when I remember it….. There was a small mound of dirt right behind us, and we just barely managed to struggle back onto it like a couple sodden walruses…. The last I remember is agreeing with Tom that we better rest here for awhile…..

 The next I remember is waking up on the floor of the gym in the station, with a kindly Eskimo woman feeding me a cup of tea….. They reckon that as soon as she could get me to take a couple of sips of that tea I woke right up….. She knew what to do about hypothermia….. It turns out that we had been unconscious for a couple of hours. While we were crouched on that lump of dirt, the rescuers had got a dinghy from the station, and all the rope they could find, and then with a couple of brave guys in the dinghy they floated them out on the end on that rope, until they could drag us into the dinghy and be pulled back in with the rope. No way they could have rowed in that wind, and if the rope broke they would have been swept away….. Then they tell that they couldn’t get us into the back seat of the truck because our parkas were frozen akimbo, so they just towed the dinghy with us still in it behind the truck.

 Back at the station they had undressed us and directed fan heaters to warm us up. They were in radio touch with a doctor in Barrow, and he wanted to know our body temperatures. When they put the thermometer in Tom’s mouth while he was unconscious, he bit down and crunched the glass. That was the only thermometer they had so we don’t know what our internal temperatures were. Once we woke up we recovered fairly quickly, but it was a strange spaced-out feeling as if it was all just a dream…. Tom had lost his glasses and got a bunch sand in his eyes so couldn’t see much, and my hands were painful as they thawed out, but otherwise we survived pretty well. We had a meal and went to bed, but surprisingly I couldn’t get to sleep. Confusing images flashing and feeling a need to be struggling, and the air felt hot and stuffy in there after living in the tent…..

This was movie night at the station, so everyone was hunkered down inside. We were extremely lucky in that an elderly Eskimo couple who had been hunting along the coast in a small boat, were sheltering at the station, and he went outside to have a look at the storm. He saw our predicament and raised the alarm. If it had been an hour later it would have been too dark to see…..

Next morning a C47 transport plane was diverted and picked us up. The Eskimos took the opportunity to load in a moose carcass for their family in Barrow, and with no seats in that cargo aircraft we joined the moose on the floor. From the air I could see that the tower and tent were still standing, so my method of driving the stakes really worked, very satisfying….

We diverted to fly over another base station that I had been worried about, because they were on a very low-lying island with no shelter. The camp was swept clean, with just the heavy transmitters and parts of the tower still left in the sand….. It looked like a tragedy, but we later found out that a helicopter had picked them up just before the storm got too wild…..

In Barrow a doctor checked us out and treated Tom’s eyes scratched by the sand. Then down to Anchorage. All the skin on my hands turned black and peeled off in grotesque flakes, leaving pink skin as soft as a baby’s bottom. Had to wear gloves to protect the skin from tearing until it thickened up again. The only long term effect was that I’ve lost the sensitive feeling in the very tips of my fingers……  And I fear cold water….. 

We lost all our personal effects, and that was quite devastating for me because I had saved up several years of diaries and photos from those South American jobs, and was hand-carrying them to Canada, but got diverted……

I later found out that the ship had been safely anchored all the while and the crew was lazing below deck, but left their equipment running which gave those beeps I was concerned about. So we could have left our camp earlier when it would have been easy to get across to safety…… And also found out that our supervisor at Prudhoe Bay knew all this but was playing pool instead of tending his radio, so that we couldn’t get in touch…… Those lapses by others very nearly cost us our lives…..

By now it was mid-September and in Anchorage there was blasting sleet and snow. I remember watching a girl scampering up the street in her mini skirt because that was the fashion, but boy it looked cold and uncomfortable….. A couple of years later I flashed back to that sight when I watched a girl on a really hot day in Sydney Australia, stomping along in her heavy maxi skirt and high leather boots which was the fashion then, and boy that looked also looked so uncomfortable, but fashion is all important I guess….

Spent a week in Anchorage resting up and letting my hands heal. Then went to the last Alaskan job of the season on Augustine Island.

Augustine Island, Cook Inlet, Alaska.

Augustine Island is a volcano that is still active. There was only a bit of steam like this when we were there, but in 1998 there was an eruption big enough to disrupt air traffic at Anchorage.

These are the sort of tents we used in Alaska. Heavy vinyl canvas to prevent flapping in the wind. The centre post 4” square timber, and lots of strong rope to hold it down. A heck of a heavy job to erect them, but needed all that strength to survive the weather conditions.

 This is an example of the wind most of the time there. I’m standing balanced against the force of the wind, the tower is vertical.

 Then had another close call, this time with carbon monoxide…

That cold wind blew hard, day and night. We were supplied with a kerosene wick heater that did a little to heat the tent but vented the fumes inside the tent. We found it most useful to heat rocks on the top and then place them in our sleeping bags like hot water bottles. That constant strong wind made it easy to adjust the vent window and the door of the tent with small openings to keep a steady flow of fresh air passing through without losing too much heat. But one night I woke up all groggy like still in a dream and just wanted to keep sleeping, but there was a strong smell of fumes in the air. Turned on a flashlight and the air was all smoky, and the heater flame was burning a smoky yellow…. What had happened was that the wind had died right calm, so no fresh airflow now and the heater had burned most of the oxygen and was now releasing carbon monoxide….. Opened the door and staggered outside and sucked in a hit of fresh cold air. Pumped the sides of the tent to act like a bellows to suck in fresh air. Then had a real struggle to wake up the camp helper; he was totally groggy and just wanted to keep sleeping…. Finally got outside and sucked deep breathes of fresh air. Later we both got splitting headaches, typical symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. That was way too close a call…..

When the Augustine job finished and I got back to Anchorage, there was an airline ticket and instructions to go immediately to San Fernando California to start a course on satellite navigation (SATNAV) equipment. So never did get to go to Canada that year…..

Arrived in California still in Alaskan clothes and head space, and found myself sitting in a classroom being bombarded with a whole lot of high tech computer language that I didn’t understand at all….

But that’s another story…..

 

 

SATNAV   (Satellite Navigation)

 

The Equipment

This is October 1970. Last week I was in the wilds of Alaska working with WW2 surplus equipment, dealing with wild weather and bears, and now I’m in a classroom in San Fernando California where they’re trying to teach me how this Satellite Navigation (SATNAV) receiver works….. This was now state of the age digital electronics, and the instructor just assumed that we all had experience in such, so went at a furious pace jumping thro AND/OR gates, etc, etc.  I’d been so many years in the bush in remote places that I had missed out completely on that digital electronics, so I had no idea what was going on.  Such that, at the end of the first week I rang my boss in New Orleans (NOLA) and told him this was no good, I had no idea what they were talking about…. He replied that no one else in our company did either, and they already had a job booked in West Africa,  “… so just hang in there and ‘fake it’….”.  Then across to Boston for a course on how a DEC PDP-8 computer works. I’d never been near a computer before so same result…. Then at the last minute they realized that the SATNAV system I’d be using in Africa would have a different computer, so back to California for a day course on it….. This was a small backroom computer lab and very different from DEC corporation….  Everything seemed chaotic and so rushed that I never even got the chance to actually get hands on and learn how to operate it…… This is going to be a real challenge….., but fortunately I know that my boss will understand if I can’t pull it off……

That PDP-8 computer was touted as being the first ‘transportable’ computer, but it certainly wasn’t portable. The computer itself only weighed about 30lbs, but the power supply weighed more like 90lbs! And that was without input/output capability, which was done with a heavy old style, clattering teletype machine, the sort that used punched paper tape for the data input and a typewriter for output. The ‘8’ stood for 8 KILObytes of total memory!, all RAM, no ROM at all! To boot up had to flip a series of switches in a specified pattern thro multiple steps, then feed a boot-up paper tape. Then feed in a program on more paper tape.  Then still had only the remainder of that 8k for the complex spherical geometry computations to work  out a latitude and longitude from the satellite signals. It was very slow and took several minutes to spit out a fix. Can’t even imagine how they could do that when these days we think in terms of megabytes of memory even for a phone…..

This was only the third  SATNAV receiver released by the US Navy for civilian use . It came with no detailed instructions that I ever saw, so it was a mystery to figure out how it was supposed to be used. But fortunately that’s the sort of challenge that I’m pretty good at, so succeeded. The satellites were in polar orbit so there was an overhead pass every couple of hours. Had to get the receiver tuned onto the satellite signal as soon as the satellite came over the horizon, then keep it tuned in for the 15 minutes or so of the pass. The data came in two-minutes segments of jumbled numbers punched out onto paper tape, and had to get at least five of those segments without any errors for a decent position fix….. That position usually had an accuracy of about 600ft. I had to take 30 fixes and compute the average to get a reliable fix within 100ft, and that usually took about 3 days on site. It was pretty amazing for those days to be able to get such an accurate position without reference to any surveyed grid. Even complex star shots weren’t that dependable.

The receiver, antenna, pre-amp, computer, teletype,  and generator, all weighed about 600lbs and was awkward to transport to remote locations.  Nowadays a mobile phone gives a GPS accuracy of a few feet, instantly, and fits in my pocket……

 

The Sat Nav Jobs

West Africa

The equipment had already been shipped to Douala in the Camerouns, West Africa (often called ‘The Armpit of Africa’…). While I flew to Paris then on by Air Afrique,  and I was on my way to the new ‘adventure’…. This job was to set a marker buoy to position an offshore drilling rig that was going to arrive from Angola.

I was met by the drilling company’s representative and installed in a luxury hotel with a fine French restaurant. 

Very different from the years in tents in remote places…

On the menu was ‘Cheval Tartare’ (raw horse), and since the drilling company was paying I had to try it, …but even with the excellent wine to wash it down I couldn’t stomach it …...

Then over to the warehouse where the equipment was waiting. I was excited to try this equipment because the new computer was a big advance from the original DEC. It had 20k memory instead of 8k, and read out the latitude and longitude on dials rather than needing the cumbersome teletype machine.

But when I hooked it all up and plugged it in, nothing happened at all! Not even a power indicator light, so on most equipment that would usually indicate a blown fuse….. The computer was sealed and I wasn’t supposed to open it, but I was desperate….. So I broke the seal and had a look inside….. There were two 30-pin sockets on the back, but one was a blank with no internal wiring attached. It turned out that the supplied cable to the SATNAV receiver was hooked on that blank socket, so no way it could work! So I moved the cable over to the wired socket, and then some lights came on! But it still wouldn’t compute a fix, just locked itself in a loop with the lights flashing…..  No instruction manual supplied so it was a complete mystery…... I tried everything I could think of, but no success…. The drilling company rep was leaning over my shoulder and growling, “…we’ve got a rig that’ll be here in a couple of days that costs $25,000 a day, two tugs at $9000 a day each, and a crew standing by, etc, etc. and if you don’t get this thing working  YOUR ASS IS GRASS…” Well then the pressure was really on….. In those days couldn’t just phone the US from there so had to use telegrams, which wasn’t very useful. I was still struggling and sweating when word came that the rig had run into a storm and one leg broke off so the job was off until they could repair it back in Angola……

That computer was supposed to have been checked out and working when it left the workshop, but it obviously wasn’t working if the plug was on the empty socket….  When I was at the shop a technician was sweating over another system that had to go to Singapore that night, but was having no success and was in a panic. So I reckon he snatched the computer out my system and put it in his to get out of trouble, then I got the trouble….. I shipped the system back to the US then got notice to go to a job in the North Sea.

 

North Sea

I joined the seismic boat  M/V OS Petty, working in the North Sea out of Aberdeen and Peterhead in Scotland.

The equipment this time was the PDP-8 and the teletype, so I had some time to get used to it. But the SATNAV only gave a fix every couple of hours, and the survey required a minute by minute location, so a complex bottom-tracking sonar was supposed to keep track in between fixes. That sonar equipment was designed for maneuvering large ships when docking in port, so usually working in shallow water, but we were in water depth to 100 fathoms (600ft), so it was really marginal.  I was forever battling with it to try to get it back on signal after dropping out, so didn’t get much sleep…. Fortunately the other operator was very good a guessing the shot points for long stretches between satellite fixes so we faked it that way…..

This was winter in the north of the North Sea, so it was just one winter gale after the next. We’d steam out to the work area and lay out the cable and only get a little bit of work done before it would get too rough, then we’d have a long rough ride back to port. Peterhead is a very traditional Scottish fishing port and when we were stuck there one Sunday we went ashore and asked an old fella where the cinema was. He fairly frothed at the mouth and gave us a stern lecture in Scottish brogue about no movies on the Sabbath…… Of course no pub open either…. Then one time the gale was so strong that we couldn’t get back to Scotland at all and had to run with the wind to Stavanger in Norway, where the crew fumed about beer costing about $6 a glass... Then for awhile worked out of Kirkwall, Orkney Islands, where Sunday was just as dead as Peterhead….

I absolutely hated that job, working 6-on 6-off if not continuously, and living in the confines of that boat with 30 other men…. So it was a real relief to get the word that the drilling rig was now repaired and I was to go back to Africa.

Africa Again 

This time the equipment was with the PDP-8 computer that I was now somewhat familiar. While riding the boat back and forth and waiting out that rough weather, I studied a manual about programming in the BASIC language. It wasn’t all that difficult, and I was able design programs to compute the averages and root mean squares for the multiple fixes I would take for bench marks on land. Installed all the equipment in a workboat to go out to the proposed location. This was a small steel workboat and my equipment had to be under the front deck which was painted black and no air circulation, so you can imagine how hot that was under the equatorial sun, like a sauna…..

When I turned on the computer it wouldn’t compute a fix, just printed rubbish…. This time the computer wasn’t sealed but had an array of spare circuit boards. Once again no instructions for what clues to look for, so I was just randomly trying different boards. While leaning over the unit to work on it, sweat kept dripping off my nose onto the electronics, which could cause even more errors. The drilling rig was now visible on the horizon and getting closer….. The captain of the tugboat was calling on the radio, “…where’s that goddamned buoy???…” Had to get it set and double check it’s position, so the pressure was extreme once again. …. Finally I noticed that one circuit board had a potentiometer that could be adjusted. I tried turning it and the computer printed different rubbish, so I was onto something! Finally found a setting where it suddenly calculated a fix and printed an answer. It turned out that this was the timing for the processor, and the extreme temperature drove it off frequency. Of course it had been originally set up in an airconditioned workshop in the US….

Only got a fix every couple of hours, and the rig now looming close, so had to just take the last fix and guess an offset to the required location and set the buoy and get out of the way of the tugboats….

The drilling rig being towed to the marker buoy.

 Once the rig was on location and had it’s legs jacked down to the bottom, I had to take my equipment on board and take a series of fixes to confirm it’s true location. And that provided more stressing challenges…… First of all, when I turned on the computer it only printed rubbish again…… Of course now we were in the air conditioned control room, and the frequency had to be re- tuned. No instruments to help do that, just trial and error….  Then it turned out that they hadn’t sent me any spare paper tape for the teletype, also no printer paper, just what was in the machine. That ran out very quickly and I was stuck, with the rig boss swearing, “… what sort of company is this anyhow…”. He was a tobacco spittin’, southern ‘old boy’, but he sure knew how to manage that enormously complex jack-up drilling rig.

I was desperate so had to improvise, but fortunately that’s one of my best skills. I found that they had rolls of depth sounder paper that I could use in the printer. It didn’t have the suitable perforations for the drive mechanism so I had to gently pull on it just fast enough to keep it feeding. For the punch tape, I got butcher’s paper from the cook and made a cutter with razor blades so that I could slice it into narrow strips. It wasn’t as stiff as the proper punch tape so I also had to feed that by hand, so it was a ‘one-armed-paper-hanger’ operation to gently pull both at the same time and keep the tensions just right on both….. And the softer paper in the punch often punched errors or bunched up, so then I would have to type in all the hundreds of numbers from the printer output to punch a new tape….  It was an exhausting high pressure job, day and night every time there was a satellite pass, such that the rig boss once found me frozen, staring at the machine but not moving, and incoherent, so I had to take a couple of hours of sleep….. But I did finally get the job done, and the rig was only 160ft off the specified location and that was close enough. If I hadn’t been able to improvise like that, the company would have had to fly out more paper which would have taken days and held up the whole show, so it would have been costly and a blow to our reputation.

So my boss was right when he said, “ You’ll just have to fake it…”, and I must say that I faked it really well, cause that’s what I’m good at doing…. By ‘faking’ it I don’t mean pretending to know more than I do, but rather by being clever at picking up clues and improvising a way around faults…. When I was finished and going ashore, that rig boss came and congratulated me for the supreme effort he’d noted, and that was very satisfying…. 

The drilling company had a charter flight going to the Canary Islands for crew change, and I wanted to go there. I wasn’t properly cleared to leave the Cameroons that way so the drilling company rep drove me onto the airport just as they were starting the engines and I climbed in and we were away, hopefully never to return to this ‘Armpit of Africa”…....

North Sea again….

I had a week in the Canary Islands, hobnobbing with the Swedish and German tourists soaking up the sun on

bikini-crowded beaches…..

 Lots of cafes with signs, “Good Svensk coffee”….

 Then I got a telegram telling me to head for the North Sea again, what a contrast…..

Working out of Lerwick Shetland Islands this time, but now summer time so fewer storms and more time at sea. Then around to the Hebrides off western Scotland, and on to western Ireland working out of Galway and Killybags. Very lively pubs there….  Then back to Lerwick and Aberdeen and the North Sea again for four months.

As said before, I absolutely hated that job, working 6-on 6-off if not continuously, and living in the confines of that boat with 30 other men….  With the satellite navigation and GPS coming, all the work would soon be on board these crowded boats, so there wouldn’t be much chance of ever getting back to the old base station work that I loved so much……

So after four months of this work I wrote my resignation letter to ONI….. Once they found a replacement I was back in New Orleans to settle up. When they added up my  accounts, it turned out they owed me $50,000 in back pay! And that was a lot of money in the 70’s. We were paid on a basis of 22 working days a month, but I had been working 365 days for several years, so had accumulated all those extra days.

Then to my old home in Canada for a well-earned break. Got two months there then an offer from ONI to go to a job surveying the west coast of Baja, Mexico with SATNAV. Well I couldn’t pass up an offer for an adventure like that, so was soon in Los Angeles preparing a couple of 4WDs for the rough road trip ahead.

Baja California, Mexico

Baja California means ‘Lower California’, and is the Mexican name for that peninsula extending south from present day American California, usually just known as ‘Baja’ these days .

Surprisingly, the west coast had never been surveyed before. An oil company was wanting to do a seismic survey off that coast so needed some accurate bench marks set for the base stations to come.

This was before there was a paved road down there, so there would be lots of rough tracks, and we would have to go off even those tracks to get to the required sites. The lead vehicle was to be an old International 4WD, which was a great powerful brute and I loved it. The other was a Chevy 4WD which in those days was crap….

 Installed the SATNAV gear and some basic camping gear and hit the road

The International 4WD with satellite antenna and dipole antenna for SSB radio.

Must have looked pretty weird to the locals....

Only satellite receiver and paper punch to record data.

Fixes to be computed on computer back in the office.

Gotta get to the top.

Got up there.

These spines gave flat tires all around.

Patching flat tires.

Cooking breakfast along the way.

Sometimes couldn’t get the vehicles to the top.

	Not enough burros…..
Lugging that damn antenna to the top.	Finally ready to receive signals.

 

 

Originally there was talk of another SATNAV job over on the Yucatan side of Mexico, but that was cancelled a week before Christmas and told to head back to LA. Spent a couple of days getting new springs installed and tune-up on the trucks, then headed north.  Three days hard driving trying to get home for Christmas….  The main road was still dirt and very rough, giving another broken spring, patched up with homemade clamps….  So many deep gullies that you just couldn’t see until the last moment... Hard on the brakes, slide down the steep side, shift into first gear and full throttle to get up the other steep side…..

Finally back into Los Angeles on December 23^rd. Of course no chance of booking a flight at that time so out to the airport and try for a last minute cancellation. Finally got one to Vancouver then the same waiting game there. Finally arrived in Edmonton at 4am on Christmas morning. Didn’t want to disturb my brother at that time of night so into a motel.  Stepped out of the bus from the airport into -26 °F (-32°C), still wearing just my work clothes from Mexico, denim jacket and straw hat…. A real shock! Inside the motel was very hot, like they tend to like it there….. Very stuffy and stale recirculated air, so different from the fresh air I was used to while living in tents…..  Kept waking up feeling that I was suffocating….. 

A couple of weeks later it was a record breaking -49°F (-45°C) when I left on the train for Vancouver. When it’s that cold the grease in the bearings of all those axles is like putty and the engine has a hard time pulling it all, so we went slowly. Then we stopped in Jasper overnight until another locomotive could come and help push us over the mountain passes ahead….  Two days later I was in Hawaii and a balmy 76°F (24°C), headed for New Zealand again and retirement - for awhile…..

But don’t go away folks, more to come….. My boss later tracked me to NZ and the silver-tongued  devil made another offer of adventure in the Amazon that of course I couldn’t refuse….
But that’s another story…….

The Amazon

(Unfortunately the film processors in New Zealand lost seven precious rolls of thirty-six exposure film that I had deposited for processing, never found them.)

I was semi-retired for awhile, and living in a caravan (house trailer) on a boatyard in New Zealand, deciding whether or not to start building a yacht to cruise the world. When a telegram arrived asking me to ring my previous boss at Offshore Navigation Inc….. I thought it might be just to enquire about some details of a previous job, but should have known better…..  That silver-tongued-devil offered me the job of doing a SATNAV survey of the upper Amazon, and of course he knew I’d bite for an adventure like that! So I was soon flying across the Pacific to New Orleans.

This project was in Oriente Peru, just east of the Andes, and truly the upper parts of the Amazon Basin. 

 

 Here’s an interactive map that you can zoom in and scroll Amazon Basin

This area of Peru was hot for oil exploration, so the companies had to know the actual boundaries of their leases.  But the whole area had never been accurately surveyed before because it’s completely flat and covered with tall dense forest, so no line of sight for a conventional trigonometric survey.  The SATNAV could solve that problem.

Until now there were only a few bench marks which had been set by star shots. I’ve done land-based star shots in the past, and know that they can be accurate but are totally dependent on a true vertical as set by bubble level or a mercury pool. But the catch is that in this area the gravity is effected by the enormous mass of the Andes mountain range to the west and only the vast sedimentary basin to the east, slightly deflecting the mercury in the dish. I did a SATNAV check on a bench mark set previously by star shots, and found it to be three miles in error…..

The object of this project was to use the SATNAV to set bench marks where the SHORAN transmitters could be set to provide accurate navigation for an aircraft carrying side-scan radar (SLAR) equipment.  The side-scan equipment was able to ‘see’ through the rainforest canopy and give an image of the ground underneath, often showing creeks and features that wouldn’t show in aerial photographs.  These images, accurately positioned by the SATNAV, will make a really useful map of this very remote and unsurveyed area.  The SLAR equipment had been used in Vietnam to try to find the Ho Chi Minh trails, but this was the first time all this technology was used for this civilian purpose.

First of all based at Pucallpa. Pucallpa is at the end of the road over the Andes from coastal Peru and is a river port on the Ucayali River. A busy town, full of trucks from the west coast and boats on the river system.  As with most ports and frontier towns it was dusty and a bit rough on the edges, with lots of bars and all that follows single men on the loose…..

Pucallpa river front.

In Tarapoto, a neighbouring town.

 

The Ucayali is a tributary of the Amazon River system, which is the ‘highway system’ for that whole basin area, no roads out there…. From here you can go by boat anywhere in this vast river basin, down one tributary and up another.  4000km (2200mi) to the Atlantic Ocean, for a descent of only 500ft, that’s only 4.4ft per mile, so gentle current.

My job was to first go to the points marked on the map and take enough satellite passes to set an accurate bench mark, usually 3 days.  Those were very remote locations and took some getting to, sometimes by float plane and sometimes by boat along the rivers.  The float planes were Twin-Beavers operated by the Peruvian air force. Great aircraft for such flying over such total jungle, because they can actually fly safely on one engine. The last place I’d ridden in a Twin Beaver was on the north slope of Alaska, what a contrast!

No GPS in those days, and very difficult to identify one winding river from another, they all look the same, so it’s difficult for navigation. Couldn’t fly high to get a grand view due to puffy clouds all the time.  One time they landed me on a river just over the border into Brazil, but no problem, the Brazilians understood, gave them some cigarettes and they let us go back…..

One spectacular flight that we did just for fun was in a Cessna 180 was through the ‘Pongo de Manseriche’, the narrow gorge where the Maranon River exits the last of the mountains  and out into the flat Amazon Basin.

 

 

 

This was the pilot and plane. He was later killed when trying to land at this strip.

Caught by a downburst from a storm like this and thrown into the river on approach…..

Also some long rides in an outboard powered launch, camping on sand bars and eating piranha caught along the way (very bony), but what a great adventure!   This was some of the best times on the job, out of touch and on our way at our own pace…..

No photos of the boat, but similar to the one in the background,	Slowly up the river.
Inside the boat.	This is the helper cooking dinner on the roof
What a way to travel!

One location that had been picked out from the air, turned out to be a small military base on a remote river.  I set up on the hill behind the base. They hadn’t been informed that I was coming and I had no paperwork to authorize my reason for being there, so this foreigner with all that strange equipment must have appeared very suspicious to them.  So I was politely ‘detained’ until they could get word from headquarters by erratic radio, to let me go. Eating at their table and drinking their beer, great hospitality.  After that I insisted on carrying an official letter from the oil company to authorize my presence in all those parts…..

 The purpose of all that air and river travel was to get to those sites on the map and get enough satellite passes with the SATNAV equipment for an accurate fix.

This was my favourite site.

On high dry ground, overlooking the mighty Amazon

no one living nearby.

Then back in town to process those passes into a fix with the computer. Then there was an added duty in that I had to use the computer and teletype to calculate and print out pre-plots of the distances from each base station to points along the lines that the aircraft were required to fly. The aircraft would always have signals from at least two base stations, and with those two distances they could navigate accurately along the line. The software for all those calculations had been provided by the company and supposedly tested in the USA. But when I asked the computer to do the calculations it just locked into a loop and couldn’t calculate results…..

So, once again I was caught in a spot with a computer that wouldn’t work and the pressure of two costly big twin-engine aircraft and equipment  and crews standing by wanting to get flying…… No dependable telephone from there to New Orleans so I couldn’t get much help from the software developers. The satellite fixes and the sample test runs that they had done ran fine so it wasn’t the computer….. I knew how to get the computer to print out the program it was trying to run, and when steaming back and forth in the North Sea, I had studied how to read the programming code. I knew nothing of the spherical trigonometry involved, but I could read that in part of the equation it subtracted the latitude at the beginning of the line from the latitude at the end and divided that into something else. Ah-ha! Since we had to fly lines due east and west, the latitude would be the same at both ends so the line, and thus the computer would be asked to divide by zero, and even a computer can’t do that….. All the test lines done in the USA had been diagonal so this fault wouldn’t have been a problem….. It looked like they’d have to develop a new program, but they no longer had access to the engineer who developed it, so this was going to be a long, and very costly delay…. Then I figured out the simple solution that saved the company from all that disaster….. I just changed the latitude at one end of the line by one decimal point of a degree, which wouldn’t make any difference to a line a hundred km long. The computer would now be dividing by an extremely small number, but was doable and the program worked just fine….. So once again I had saved the day with a bit of lateral thinking and improvising, very satisfying……

 

Later in the job we moved base down river to Iquitos,

with images of past grandeur during the rubber boom in the 1880’s.

 

……………………………………………………..

 

That SLAR survey job for PetroPeru took six months, then I had a break until another short job for BP would start, so headed off to Cuzco and Machu Picchu for Christmas. Great time to be there, with hundreds of Indians from surrounding districts in town to celebrate.

Then back to Pucallpa to set four bench marks for BP. One site was easily accessible by boat, then the next beside a ‘cocha’ (oxbow lake, bayou, billabong in OZ). The cocha was easy enough to get into with a 182 float plane, but was exciting getting back out again….. Of course such bush flights are always overloaded, just trying to get all the equipment on board and save another flight, not really a good move…. So we were heavy, and the water surface sheltered by the trees both sides, so glass smooth, not good for float flying….. I didn’t know the pilot so that’s always suspect in these such countries…. Not wide enough to do circles to make waves, so he just powered on and then rocked the plane trying to break loose from the water, then a momentary heave on the flap leaver (fortunately manual flaps) to break loose, then back to no flap to reduce drag. By now we’d used a lot of space to just barely get off and then the cocha curved around to reveal a wall of tall trees at the end, most alarming!…… Luckily he was a really experienced pilot, and didn’t try to climb out at that low speed, but kept it right down close to the water in ‘ground effect’ to best accelerate to the fastest speed possible, then at the very last moment he heaved back on the yoke and zoom-climbed over the trees and then levelled off just above them. Very alarming but very well done…..

The very last site was far away from any river, so we had to walk in with thirty porters. Three days walking under dense rainforest. So dense that there was no undergrowth. A dark and eerie place, with frequent rain dripping because this was now the rainy season, so slogging through mud….. My leather boots sagged out of shape and started to come apart from the constant wet, should have worn rubber boots….   With thirty porters carrying my equipment and fuel, and food and camp gear for all. Luckily I had them bring my tent and camp cot and of course I always carried my faithful mosquito net, so I was comfortable at night. They worked for the exploration company and were very poorly supplied, just leaky tarps for cover and had to make beds of palm fronds on that wet ground crawling with whatever….. Twice we came to creeks that were too deep to wade, so for one they felled a big tree to walk across and the other built a raft, very tough and capable bushmen…..

Crossing a creek.

 

Packing up after an overnight camp

When I set up my equipment I discovered that very little fuel had arrived. The porter would have stolen most of it and stashed it in the bush so that he could retrieve it later. Then the cook reported that very little food had arrived, same thing…… Since that crew was controlled by the exploration company I left it to them to watch for theft. On such a trek if I contracted the men, I would usually try to keep all of them together and follow last to watch for pilfering, but this was their company’s  responsibility, and anyhow no way I could watch everyone on such a long walk…. Couldn’t reach the company base camp by radio to tell the problem and get more stuff on the way, so had to send some men back to get more, so this was going to take days….. So once I’d used the little bit of fuel, we had to just sit there in the quiet and wait….  At night some fungi on leaves on the ground glowed with an eerie light….

Waiting can be relaxing but not when your tummy is complaining….. Fortunately we had a shotgun but they were only able to find a couple of big monkeys, not much for two dozen men….. But when they were hunting they found a small patch of yams that had been planted long ago when the rubber boom was happening here. This was a great find and served for a couple of meals. They gathered a bunch of wild palm nuts, which when bruised and boiled gave a drink something like milo without sweetener….  Then they tried to poison fish in the creek by the old traditional method. They gathered a lot of bark from certain trees and pounded that to release the sap. Then wove screens from palm fronds to block off both ends of a pool. Then spread the bark pulp and stirred it into the water. Only a couple of small fish came to the surface, so the poison worked, but not many fish in this pool….

So everyone was very relieved when the porters arrived back with a bag of rice and a bag of beans, all sewn into a duffle bag to prevent pilfering…. There wasn’t as much fuel as should have been, but just enough to get the job done. Then it was a fast two day walk back out of there, everyone keen to get back to base camp and good food and a shower…..

Thus my last job with ONI SATNAV finished, and what a grand finale.

I came for adventure and it couldn’t get much better than that!

 

Back in New Orleans I was offered the position of heading up the SATNAV division, but I firmly declined…. I knew that it would be a hell of a job, mostly in the office without the adventure of the bush, and caught between demanding clients and incompetent men in the field. Couldn’t get highly qualified technicians to go and work in those conditions, so would have had to send inexperienced mongrel adventurers like me…. And hassling with high-tech cutting-edge equipment that was not yet developed properly and expecting it to work in those conditions….. I knew the equipment would be a real pain, and I knew that I wouldn’t be a good personnel manager at all, so I have no regrets turning down the offer. 

I now had a bunch of money in the bank, and the itch for a more settled life after all those travels. In those days I had the option of six good countries where I could legally become a resident – Canada, USA, UK, South Africa, New Zealand or Australia. Canada - way too sub-arctic after all that time in the tropics, USA - grand geography and great opportunities but other downsides…, the UK - way too small and confining, South Africa - also grand geography but inevitable racial problems ahead…, New Zealand - friendly and safe but still not enough room, Australia - sub-tropical climate, safe and friendly society, and vast spaces of adventurous outback to be explored.

So, headed for Australia to settle down, and never regretted it........

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