Damn is it slow here.
It would appear that I have finally got this place running like a clock. Now we have fewer campers on sight, less field work and too many people doing my job. It’s one thing for me to appear that I am a busy little beaver while truthfully I find myself constantly wavering on how I will configure that new laptop I covet. But trying to manage the least self motivated, constantly looking for a companion on the internet, having worked on this project for 3 months-1 month more than I have-and still has no idea of what to do with himself everyday, makes my job doubly difficult.
“What’s priority today?”
“Same as always Willie” (not his real name, he prefers William)
“What’s that?”
“Heat, Light, Water, Shit and Garbage.”
“Oh..OK”
Day in Day out the same query, One of these days it is going to sink in and it will probably be the day he sets the garbage on fire in his Winnipeg apartment all the while running a hose up three flights of stairs to fill the bathtub wondering how he is going to flush the toilet into a big black plastic bag.
Poor bastard!
So how does one keep the one community worker in camp busy? Menial labour. Tell the guy if he wants he can move 8 pallets of 50lb salt bags from one side of camp to the other. I told him to take his time and that he could use the quad. It didn’t take him too long to complete that task. I had this brilliant idea of drinking all the booze in camp and having a house wrecker party so as Willie and I would have something to do the next day but we haven’t had a plane in almost a week and there is no booze!
Now I am thinking about having him move the drill steel from one side of camp to the other and then tomorrow changing my mind.
As for myself. I have had a bit of secretarial duties to perform as well as constantly hassleing our fixed wing charter provider.
“When do we get any of the planes that we booked last week?!”
"The food that was supposed to come up on that Friday flight we had reserved is currently rotting at our expeditors warehouse, Are you going to pay to resupply us if and when you actually send the plane?”
“We have a sample pile here that is quickly becoming the highest piece of topography in the eastern arctic”
“Our helicopters don’t run on hydrogen power yet!”
More on that one in a bit…
I just can’t wait until they send the invoices and start wondering how come we haven’t paid.
“Sorry, the check went out on the flight to Hayes camp. It will be overnighting there for the weekend.”
“Sorry, airmail had a mechanical, maybe tomorrow.”
“Oh there was a whole bunch of oversized mail stuck at the post office and we had to go rescue it.”
“Stamp emergency in Baker Lake.”
Bastards! It’s not so much that I am worried about getting fuel for the helicopters, sending the sample mountain south or the rotting food in the warehouse. No, I got two flats of Trad sitting somewhere in Rankin and I think in the alcohol starved north that the locals may be able to sniff it out.
Speaking of Jet fuel:
So yesterday I got to go on an adventure. I was asked if I would mind going out to do a little prospecting. I jumped, no, leaped at the opportunity to escape! The plan was to put down at a couple rather nice looking indicator occurrences and just look around for kimberlite or anything that may explain what we were seeing on various geochem/geophysical result maps. The work primarily entails walking around with your head down, turning over a few rocks and bashing them up and observing whether or not they are the mineral we are looking for. A great excuse to plug into the little music box and wield a heavy hand.
It also gave me the opportunity to take one of the helicopters a little ways to the northwest and clean up a couple of fuel caches. The idea was to transfer all of the empty barrels to a location that at float plane could gather them along with the accumulated samples.
So everything was progressing along smoothly until we got close to the seconds site and realized that we weren’t going to have enough fuel to move everything in one shot. So we punched off the load and made our way back to camp for a fill up. It wasn’t until the waypoint was plugged into the GPS that we realized the gravity of the situation. 20 minutes to camp and only 15minutes of useable fuel. No problem. We’ll just put down and call camp on the sat phone.
Problem. After an hour of walking around and bashing rocks we left the helicopters sat phone with the remaining prospecting crew as they neglected to bring one of there own. No Problem. We’ll just call camp on the radio.
Problem. It’s lunchtime and no-one is answering the radio in the office. Call again, no reply, climb higher, call again. Reply! Hurray. Relay current situation…then the chip light starts to flash.
“Low fuel”
Pilot manages to dictate last known position and just before we land he tells me that they were only approximate co-ordinates. So a bit of headshaking and the odd “this has never happened to me before” ensues for the next hour or so. We make a stack of rocks and throw rocks at this stack. He has another cigarette, the odd photo is taken and eventually the other machine arrives, with everybody in camp that could fit into it seemed. They were going to enjoy this moment. Soon enough we had enough fuel on board to get us to camp where we would top it right up and grab another sat phone for one of those just in case moments.
Gas N Go!
The barrels eventually ended up where they were supposed to and we got back to the prospecting only two hours late. I spent the next couple of hours getting’ my groove on and knocking on rocks. No luck on the kimberlite but I did make one startling discovery. Red leaves on the sparse ground cover. The first sign of fall…Last night our weather went for a shit and today was a movie day.
Summer can’t be over yet…Can it?
