Hi All:
I’ve ordered a few POD copies of Deadly Enterprise, but they’ve not arrived yet. To order the large print paperback off the Double Dragon website (at http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-466-9 ) you need to click on the link at the top right hand corner of the page. BTW, large print doesn’t mean the almost Braille copies produced for the vision impaired – these are 14 pt that are easier to read than the ‘cram in as much print as possible to save cost’ PODs that some others sell.
I will have a new review of Deadly Enterprise appear, tomorrow the reviewer thinks. Eugen Bacon reviewed the novel at TCM Reviews http://www.tcm-ca.com/ for me. She and E. Don Harpe have an exceptional story in Twisted Tales II, volume 2 from Double Dragon.
I’ll remind you of the other sites that have posted promotions for my novel release.
My interview with Rachael Byrd is at http://www.xanga.com/rachaelbyrd
My interview with Cheryl Maladrinos is at -- http://aspiringauthor.blogspot.com/2007/06/meet-author-christopher-hoare.html
Novelspot has a great resource page for me at http://novelspot.net/node/1733
So now it’s on to the latest tale from Oil Gypsy.
We had plenty of trouble from white-outs and ground blizzards in the Arctic Islands when I worked there. Ground blizzards consisted of all the snow picked up by strong winds into a blinding storm; as distinct from a regular blizzard of fresh snow coming down on the wind. The Arctic wasn’t short of winds, but snow was actually scarce – the place is properly called an ice-desert – and the little that fell was blown back and forth all winter until it took refuge in some gully.
White-outs are more bizarre, the air fills with minute ice crystals to make a white fog. The white ground and the white sky merge into a single continuum that allows no perception of depth and barely a sense of up or down. When traveling under those conditions I was always on the lookout for steep drop-offs, which in the varied places we worked could be as little as ten feet or several hundred. I fitted my tracked survey unit with a halogen spotlight mounted in a swivelling tractor mount beside the roof hatch. In white-outs I pointed the lamp at the ground just in front of the tracks and watched the faint spot like a hawk as I drove. If the spot vanished it meant the ground had fallen away.
I would climb down from the cab to check what was ahead, feeling like a swimmer in a tank of cottonwool. I’d take baby steps forward to try to distinguish an edge beside my foot. Snow sculpted into a cornice creates a faint shadow outline against the empty space below it. I’ve even crawled on hands and knees if I suspected I could be at the top of a big cliff. It was always safest to inspect even a shallow depression before driving off the edge into it.
One morning I ran into trouble when climbing upwards. I had been surveying in an ice fog, a strange experience having the accurately leveled instrument tell you that the completely contourless fog in front of you is actually a moderate slope. The rodman had faded into the distance, turned to see I had vanished, and returned to give me a shot on the last visible terrain. I took my turn there, packed up the instrument into the Nodwell and climbed in to drive forward to a new set-up spot.
I knew the ground was uneven, a group of gullies fingered out of the hillside toward Satellite Bay on Prince Patrick Island. I nosed into what appeared to be the widest of these and then aimed at the slope in front of me, judging that I was aimed perpendicularly up the slope. It was a steep climb but all started off well. Then the Nodwell tilted to one side, the tracks lost their grip and the machine tobogganed sideways. At this point I still couldn’t distinguish the ground clearly – it felt like falling in an out-of-control plane.
Machine and I slid sideways about twenty feet before hitting the bottom. It lurched heavily but didn’t tip. I climbed out and the rodman appeared at the top of the slope, peering down. The scuff marks on the hill showed I had started up fairly well but then driven sideways off the spur I’d been climbing. I realized I had a completely mistaken idea of where I was going in the fog. But I wasn’t going any further – two wheels had been smashed and a track partly torn off. We walked back to camp.
Some of our guys had worse experiences in the Arctic. A rodman of mine had one that was a split second from becoming fatal.
I was at time off when the crew finished work on Brock Island and needed to move to the next job on Eglinton Island. Most moves at that time were done by air – load all the equipment into Hercs and make 15 or 20 trips needed to convey everything to the airstrip cleared on the next island. On this occasion they didn’t have the strip prepared and decided I could lead everyone over the sea ice and islands between to our new jobsite when I got back from the city.
It actually worked quite well, but I mustn’t get ahead of the story. While they were waiting for my return, the rodman, Don, made a couple of simple sun compasses of the pattern I had sometimes used in the Libyan Desert and he and the helicopter pilot decided they would begin the move by getting the survey Nodwells across Ballantyne Strait to Prince Patrick Island, about 50 miles away.
Don drove my Nodwell across over the sea ice one fine day and parked the machine on the low sand cliffs before being flown back to camp in the Jet Ranger. The weather closed in for a couple of days but on the next fine day they decided they’d better fly a barrel of fuel across to refill my Nodwell’s tanks. You don’t want a big diesel running out of fuel and stopping in minus 40 or 50 weather.
By this time there were several empty fuel drums out on the strait because the pilot had set them to mark the route that Don had taken to Prince Patrick. They flew over with the full drum slung underneath and the pilot set it down beside the Nodwell. Then he moved away enough to land on the cliff beside it. As Don climbed out the pilot, who had been watching the weather, said, “Better be quick – there’s a white-out building up.”
Don cranked the hand pump as fast as he could but long before the drum was dry, the pilot shouted and gestured. “Better get in, or I leave you here.”
If that seems a bit harsh, you might be interested to know that the Jet Ranger wasn’t licensed to fly on instruments. The pilot needed to have a clear view of the horizon and ground to keep flying straight. If it was eerie walking in a white-out and not being sure where the ground was, it was damned scary in a helicopter.
The pilot took off with his eyes on the approaching cloud of ice fog and dashed off in the direction of camp less than a hundred feet above the ice. They flew fast into the cloud, always picking the thinner fog where they could still peer down at the sculpted sea ice below.
Then, as Don told me later, he looked up out of a higher part of the windshield to see an oil drum floating in the air above them. That was weird. He pointed it out to the pilot. The man shrieked and hauled on the controls. The helicopter swerved and rolled . . . and the oil drum sank back below them where it was supposed to be. They had been flying almost upside down and diving at the ice.
Oh, yes. Those white-outs can kill you.
I’ve ordered a few POD copies of Deadly Enterprise, but they’ve not arrived yet. To order the large print paperback off the Double Dragon website (at http://www.double-dragon-ebooks.com/single.php?ISBN=1-55404-466-9 ) you need to click on the link at the top right hand corner of the page. BTW, large print doesn’t mean the almost Braille copies produced for the vision impaired – these are 14 pt that are easier to read than the ‘cram in as much print as possible to save cost’ PODs that some others sell.
I will have a new review of Deadly Enterprise appear, tomorrow the reviewer thinks. Eugen Bacon reviewed the novel at TCM Reviews http://www.tcm-ca.com/ for me. She and E. Don Harpe have an exceptional story in Twisted Tales II, volume 2 from Double Dragon.
I’ll remind you of the other sites that have posted promotions for my novel release.
My interview with Rachael Byrd is at http://www.xanga.com/rachaelbyrd
My interview with Cheryl Maladrinos is at -- http://aspiringauthor.blogspot.com/2007/06/meet-author-christopher-hoare.html
Novelspot has a great resource page for me at http://novelspot.net/node/1733
So now it’s on to the latest tale from Oil Gypsy.
We had plenty of trouble from white-outs and ground blizzards in the Arctic Islands when I worked there. Ground blizzards consisted of all the snow picked up by strong winds into a blinding storm; as distinct from a regular blizzard of fresh snow coming down on the wind. The Arctic wasn’t short of winds, but snow was actually scarce – the place is properly called an ice-desert – and the little that fell was blown back and forth all winter until it took refuge in some gully.
White-outs are more bizarre, the air fills with minute ice crystals to make a white fog. The white ground and the white sky merge into a single continuum that allows no perception of depth and barely a sense of up or down. When traveling under those conditions I was always on the lookout for steep drop-offs, which in the varied places we worked could be as little as ten feet or several hundred. I fitted my tracked survey unit with a halogen spotlight mounted in a swivelling tractor mount beside the roof hatch. In white-outs I pointed the lamp at the ground just in front of the tracks and watched the faint spot like a hawk as I drove. If the spot vanished it meant the ground had fallen away.
I would climb down from the cab to check what was ahead, feeling like a swimmer in a tank of cottonwool. I’d take baby steps forward to try to distinguish an edge beside my foot. Snow sculpted into a cornice creates a faint shadow outline against the empty space below it. I’ve even crawled on hands and knees if I suspected I could be at the top of a big cliff. It was always safest to inspect even a shallow depression before driving off the edge into it.
One morning I ran into trouble when climbing upwards. I had been surveying in an ice fog, a strange experience having the accurately leveled instrument tell you that the completely contourless fog in front of you is actually a moderate slope. The rodman had faded into the distance, turned to see I had vanished, and returned to give me a shot on the last visible terrain. I took my turn there, packed up the instrument into the Nodwell and climbed in to drive forward to a new set-up spot.
I knew the ground was uneven, a group of gullies fingered out of the hillside toward Satellite Bay on Prince Patrick Island. I nosed into what appeared to be the widest of these and then aimed at the slope in front of me, judging that I was aimed perpendicularly up the slope. It was a steep climb but all started off well. Then the Nodwell tilted to one side, the tracks lost their grip and the machine tobogganed sideways. At this point I still couldn’t distinguish the ground clearly – it felt like falling in an out-of-control plane.
Machine and I slid sideways about twenty feet before hitting the bottom. It lurched heavily but didn’t tip. I climbed out and the rodman appeared at the top of the slope, peering down. The scuff marks on the hill showed I had started up fairly well but then driven sideways off the spur I’d been climbing. I realized I had a completely mistaken idea of where I was going in the fog. But I wasn’t going any further – two wheels had been smashed and a track partly torn off. We walked back to camp.
Some of our guys had worse experiences in the Arctic. A rodman of mine had one that was a split second from becoming fatal.
I was at time off when the crew finished work on Brock Island and needed to move to the next job on Eglinton Island. Most moves at that time were done by air – load all the equipment into Hercs and make 15 or 20 trips needed to convey everything to the airstrip cleared on the next island. On this occasion they didn’t have the strip prepared and decided I could lead everyone over the sea ice and islands between to our new jobsite when I got back from the city.
It actually worked quite well, but I mustn’t get ahead of the story. While they were waiting for my return, the rodman, Don, made a couple of simple sun compasses of the pattern I had sometimes used in the Libyan Desert and he and the helicopter pilot decided they would begin the move by getting the survey Nodwells across Ballantyne Strait to Prince Patrick Island, about 50 miles away.
Don drove my Nodwell across over the sea ice one fine day and parked the machine on the low sand cliffs before being flown back to camp in the Jet Ranger. The weather closed in for a couple of days but on the next fine day they decided they’d better fly a barrel of fuel across to refill my Nodwell’s tanks. You don’t want a big diesel running out of fuel and stopping in minus 40 or 50 weather.
By this time there were several empty fuel drums out on the strait because the pilot had set them to mark the route that Don had taken to Prince Patrick. They flew over with the full drum slung underneath and the pilot set it down beside the Nodwell. Then he moved away enough to land on the cliff beside it. As Don climbed out the pilot, who had been watching the weather, said, “Better be quick – there’s a white-out building up.”
Don cranked the hand pump as fast as he could but long before the drum was dry, the pilot shouted and gestured. “Better get in, or I leave you here.”
If that seems a bit harsh, you might be interested to know that the Jet Ranger wasn’t licensed to fly on instruments. The pilot needed to have a clear view of the horizon and ground to keep flying straight. If it was eerie walking in a white-out and not being sure where the ground was, it was damned scary in a helicopter.
The pilot took off with his eyes on the approaching cloud of ice fog and dashed off in the direction of camp less than a hundred feet above the ice. They flew fast into the cloud, always picking the thinner fog where they could still peer down at the sculpted sea ice below.
Then, as Don told me later, he looked up out of a higher part of the windshield to see an oil drum floating in the air above them. That was weird. He pointed it out to the pilot. The man shrieked and hauled on the controls. The helicopter swerved and rolled . . . and the oil drum sank back below them where it was supposed to be. They had been flying almost upside down and diving at the ice.
Oh, yes. Those white-outs can kill you.
posted by Christopher Hoare at 10:22 AM
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