6th October - Points North, SK

There were a couple of very sore heads this morning (not me though who is almost half way through her four week alcohol free challenge – go Tan). It was a late rise and then Brendo (who has poor piss fitness we discovered) had to go back to bed, just feeling too seedy. Dan struggled through feeling marginally better. It appears I was the hardest working person for the day updating the geological spreadsheets for the boys… hehe.

Yesterday, Wes’s generator in the helicopter died so the boys called on the other helicopter and pilot from Stony Rapids to come down and help out. Jim arrived, along with his 14 seater helicopter (huge) and we were all mesmerized. Poor old Wes and his helicopter now considered not worthy of any attention once this new toy was here. This baby costs just shy of $3,000 an hour to run and we all knew as soon as we saw it that we somehow, had to get a ride in it as a once in a lifetime experience, as it would only be at Points North for probably one day.

Now, to say Jim likes a chat is the understatement of the century. We wandered if the man had any human contact in the month that he had been at Stony Rapids. Jim arrived back from part of his days work at around 3.30 pm. We spoke to him and he was leaving in about ten minutes to do some pickups, drop offs and slinging and we WERE getting on that helicopter. We went and got some warm clothing plus a bag of stuff to see us through the night if in the worse case scenario happened and we couldn’t fly back to Points North. I didn’t like to ask what that worse case scenario might have been.
A quick helicopter safety induction, we buckled in and took off on our next adventure. Dan got the front seat. This helicopter only has two blades (compared to the other one that has three) and is much more powerful. In no time at all we lifted off. Whilst the helicopter itself is noisier and not as smooth as the other one it was still awesome, particularly when Jim flew really low at around 100 feet. We picked up Derek and Matt who were doing some GPS work. Unfortunately no one seemed to know where the next set of holes were and we spent some more time in the air aimlessly looking around with Brendo giving comments from the super coach in the back seat. We weren’t complaining! At the next stop we all got out to meet Bobby and Travis, the linecutters for around 30 minutes whilst Jim did some slinging. Due to the more dangerous work involved in slinging, the helicopter pilot is not allowed any additional passengers than those involved directly in the slinging.
Thirty minutes passes quickly, all seven off us piled in and we headed back to Raven Camp stopping for a while to hover over some drill sites so Dan could take some perspective photo’s for the corporate website. At Raven, we dropped off three of the passengers and picked up Lindsay and headed back to Points North. I took the front seat for this trip. It was awesome, albeit a little scary when Jim showed some of his maneouvers like tilting the helicopter almost on its side whilst flying (I had to hang onto the window for fear of grabbing some of the instrumentation - the second joystick was right between my legs). It was awesome.
We got back to Raven and promptly had to put on some music “Paint it Black” by the Rolling Stones. It did used to be the theme music to Tour of Duty and this particular type of helicopter was used in the Vietnam War (a Bell 205 - Hughie Hogg or Iriquois). Brendo did his best machine gun hanging out of the side of the helicopter impersonation. An absolutely awesome day!!