I'm wondering how many of us out there actually
test their systems ?
Last weekend after the Vic Exploroz Ruffy drive, Ilder Chris was explaining his choice of satphone and the first thought that occurred to me was to verify the comments, So we drove to a spot I know only 3km from a phone tower which is a dead spot
and sure enough a Telstra phone had no reception but Chrises satphone (GlobalStar ?) worked fully showing how useful they can be not far from
Melbourne !
However it isn't just things that need to be checked, its also our own capabilities and with these thoughts in mind and the current search for a missing child in bush just 25km away, I thought its high time to
test one's own ability to get thru some serious bush alone.
I nominated a point about 5km down a 4wd track I knew and plotted a difficult cross country bush walk to it, which was about 2km away.
Then set out on foot to get their and back allowing 6 hours for the hike and return.
The extra things I took other than the obvious was my trusty Garmin 276c GPS into which I had entered just the start and destination waypoints, a mobile phone and a roll of pink fluro tape and gloves.
The thick foliage meant that within 100 meters I was out of sight and relying solely on the GPS for direction and began marking the path with the fluro tape at least every 50 meters.
Quite a fascinating experience actually and after the first fall and a few cuts you soon start to think that this isn't a bad simulation at all.
Deep in one ferny gully and with heavy cloud cover the GPS lost signal and then I really did sit down and think about the best way to proceed.
It would be very easy to get lost, so I back tracked and made the last two pink fluro tape
track markers more obvious and moved on keeping them roughly in line and always keeping one in sight until I reached a less dense bit of
forrest where I positioned the GPS better and got it picking up satellites again.
Gloves came in quite handy as expected to break thru the bush, but in still took nearly 3 hrs to get to the destination.
Despite being near stuffed I embarked on the return trip without taking a drink and made it back in about 45 minutes following my markers.
Muscles where starting to ache by the time I got to the car and I wasn't in a really good mood when I was hit by 2 small incidents which really added some pressure to the endevour.
First the stupid car started ok but ran for about 15 secs and died.
I then realized it was the driver not the car that was dumb, I had parked the car on a steep slope when nearly empty and the fuel pump pickup was out of the fuel so it simply ran out of petrol.
Being an auto I couldn't drive it 10m on the starter motor to flatter ground and instead transferred fuel over the next 15 minutes to the main tank and hit the key, after a few anxious seconds she coughed , spluttered a few times and said
"Ok I hope I've taught you a lesson", RELIEF !
As if the bush walk and car
test wasn't enough, I'd just driven off and doing the usual
check for things as you do and I couldn't find my phone.
Cutting a long story short there was no phone service but I've been through that one before and pulled out a spare phone I always carry and began a back track search using Bluetooth (
Well I did after I remembered to turn on the spare phones Bluetooth visibility).
I had had trouble with the last ravine but my luck was good this time as the phone was found only 50m from the car.
(Note as I finish writing this, the 11 year old child has just been found after 5 days in the nearby bush, fantastic )