Monthly Archives: April 2012

So I caravanned to Riggins last night with a bunch of EMTs while pulling the trailer. This created one small problem, the trailer where I had been staying wasn’t coming down till today.

Never fear though because the “Risk Manager”, read that as the EMT coordinator, made sure me and my other friends were taken care of. She put us up in the EMT shack which has it’s serious benefits. The biggest of which is a shower and wi-fi. So I had nothing much to do today other than help the EMTs set up a tent in the future.

So when I got back this afternoon and after a much needed nap I finally broke out my computer. I got my SDCard problem straightened out.

Here’s a short quick update from Tuesday on the Snake River. Boat 354 wrecked and wrecked hard. He wrecked as I called him out passing the check point. Thankfully someone else got pictures. We spent the next bit working on clearing the scene while warning other drivers. Boat 11 did a great job and got the boat off the course and out of the rapids. This was the same exact location where TMW acquired her story on Monday.  That’s that boat above.  He was the time leader and he was smokin’ fast… was being the operative word.  So what happened?  This:

Note I didn’t take that picture, if it was a bit wider you would see me on a boat behind him down stream on the left of the frame.  He looks like he just got some air, which he did.  But that which goes up must come down, and well landing was a bit hard.  Here’s something mid sequence that shows how bad he hit.

In the following pictures you can see he completely goes under water.  The wife got pictures close up of the damage after he returned to Hell’s Gate.  The boat was no longer structurally sound.  The big bummer is he came all the way from New Zealand, however the racers are working on making sure he will be able to run something even though it’s not his own boat here at Riggins.  When I get my hands on the damage pictures I’ll post them.  Suffice it to say, they both got very lucky.  Yeah I admit it’s neat to see it from the impressive forces of nature stand point, but I don’t want to see anyone hurt.  That’s why I’m here.

I’m off to another safety meeting and getting my boat assignment for the next two days.  I’ll try and get another post up tonight.

A big BZ to Mark Sharley on those photos.

Came home to get a shower tonight after getting soaked on the water today.  I am working on getting pictures copied, I left my SD card reader with the guy I’m staying with on the road.  So I’m trying to use my built in SD card reader which appears to dislike SDHC cards.

So a quick recap in text form with pictures hopefully coming here soon.  After this I’m redoing my laptop it needs it.  I do have some pics from my phone however so I’ll fill with those in the mean time.

Yesterday was uneventful.  I discovered the most awesome gas station in the world exists in St. Maries Idaho. 

Looks normal right?  Check out the back part of the inside.

I had no problem getting along with the locals up there.

Two legs were run without any real activity.  I hooked up a equipment trailer and hauled it through scenic Idaho for the administration. Got into Lewiston and had a long meeting for boat assignments.  I got a call last night that the EMT I was with was going to join us for the rest of the races.  He hopped in my truck at 0615 this morning for the ride up.

There were a few interesting stories which will be expanded on later.  My wife handled a very bad situation today quite well.  I will let her tell that story.  I’m glad to say she did me quite proud with how she handled it.

There was another incident however that I can go into now. 

In the middle of the race I catch over .54 simplex that there is someone in the parking lot of Heller Bar threatening to ticket everyone who doesn’t have some pass.  Most of the staff (all volunteer mind you) that are on the upstream leg are parked there.  How we discover this is he harassed the shore station who stationed there and intimidated them into moving.  So we lost our backup communications in Heller Bar because someone felt like getting his “Authoritah On”.  It is discovered this is an individual for WADFW and he then harassed the Communications Director’s wife as she attempted to make a sandwich (I was unaware of this slight until later that night at dinner).  Attempts at the time to get this official’s name fail.  He disappears and is obviously irritated.

We finish up the races and head back down stream.  I discover that I do not have a ticket but thankfully a warning basically saying, “Next time I give you a ticket.”

I pack up the truck and the three of us head out and back to Hell’s Gate for the comms debrief.  As I drive back I pass a DFW truck that then pulls out behind me.  Immediately I go, “Oh, was that who I think it was?”  My EMT who heard the BS earlier says, “I think it was.”  I pull over and let him pass and immediately take pursuit.  At this point I’m not sure of who he is so I start in on the radio.  The license plate was copied earlier but was not immediately available for our comparison.  It is confirmed that it was DFW.  I think, “Well how many of those ass hats can there be in this area on a Monday.” 

At this point I decide I’m going to need to make contact.  I stay on his ass, my copilot, another ham who rode up with me takes a couple pics to make sure we have a copy of his license plate for comparison later.  I don’t know how tight assed this guy is going to be so I want to collect my own pool of info to try and verify later if need be.

We blow past a 35 MPH sign and he continues doing 45MPH.  I stay right up with him.  About a half mile down the road he pulls over and I pull over right behind him.  Well what happens next was recorded, on a public road, for my own protection depending on the attitude of the officer.  There are reasons I don’t trust cops and it’s a real shame that’s the case.  I also know that series has been seen by many officers, some of which really dislike it.    So like the light being shined on the corrupt and nasty in their profession, other’s dislike it, for what reason I don’t know.

I will say the officer was polite and cordial when I talked to him, but he has seriously rubbed a couple people the wrong way.  Here is the card.

The two guys with me and myself are reasonably sure that the main reason I got the info was because I took the initiative.  Once I was at his door he was stuck, he couldn’t just run off.  The other communications people were quite happy with my ability to extract the information.  The person I was talking to on the radio said, “Don’t do anything stupid, I’m not bailing you out of jail.”

One suspicion is he is friends with people who dislike the jet boat races and he is attempting to discourage the volunteers who make it happen.  If not that, it’s a push to make a bunch of revenue on people who are working as staff.

As you can see, as annoyed as I am, I can keep my cool when necessary.  I have been informed that Bob Dice’s information is heading to the correct people to make sure stuff gets taken care of.

Overall it makes me wonder why some departments such as the sheriff, fire department, and ems was more than willing to work with us.  How much so?  We had officers on safety boats, and there was a ham on the sheriff’s boat and fire boat.

That is today’s lesson.  We have a special repeater in place for the safety communications.  Can you guess where one became none?

That’s right the repeater crapped out towards the end of the third leg.   We however resulted to other methods and continued communications without serious interruption.

I ended up stepping in a hole that quite literally went to my hip.  From the knee down ended up submerged in water and mud.  Well, I had a spare pair of boots and a pants in my pack.  Two became one.

I had three radios with me, but one proved less than useful given the communications plan.  Three became two.

So yes folk, plan on crap breaking, things going down, and just plain bad things happening.  I got back started working on this blog post while trying to copy the pictures from today.  Well my computer screwed the pooch and attempted to kill the SD card.  It is recovering as I type this.

Last night was interesting in that I had a boat assignment, but no boat.  It was a repeat of last August all over again.  I was not the most enthused.  I got a boat though we got everything hashed out and I was able to meet up on the ramp and get on station.

I lucked out that my station didn’t need to really do any traffic handling since there was a repeater.  Other stations were calling out when boats passed so my life became a simple task of take pictures and track which boats went by.

As we moved towards the third leg the wind picked up and we knew it was going to make it interesting for the boats.  Well it did. The wind almost shoved a boat into a tree stump in the currently very high river.  I do have a nice picture of it but it currently is going through the recovery process.  So no pictures for you tonight.

This will post just after I load up in my truck and depart for St. Maries for the Worlds White Water Jet Boat Races.

What this means for you.  Blogging will be much lighter than usual, almost non-existent.  I wasn’t able to queue up some state sponsored criminals like I had hoped so that will be on hold unless I stumble across some (or people send me them).

I will have my laptop with me and my phone is my internet connection.  It won’t be blazing fast where I’m going but I should hopefully be able to get some posts written up each day on what’s going on.

If you’re at the NRAAM have fun, one of these years I might make it, there’s a list of bloggers I’d really like to meet.  If you’re coming to Boomershoot I’ll see you there.  Depending on what happens and who all is there we might create a mini blogger meet Friday night since I know some are showing up Friday.  We’ll just have to play it by ear and see what happens.  The next two and a half weeks will be quite interesting though.

-AG7FO Mobile

Let me count the ways.  Seriously I thought this was a joke until my coworker said he was serious:

Deputies say that Des Voigne sleeps with a .357 revolver
in his bed for protection. Sometime during the night he woke up after
rolling over on the firearm and then placed it in his hands on his chest
and went back to sleep.

While he was sleeping he apparently squeezed the trigger shooting himself in the shoulder with a .357 hollowpoint round.

OK now here comes the confusion on my part.  If it’s a grazing wound with powder burns I can believe this.  If he’s drilled through like a piece of wood on a drill press, not so much. 

Now for the rant.  Seriously you went to sleep with the gun on your chest?  There’s these small wooden tables, they’re about bed height, they’re designed to hold things while you sleep.  I believe they’re called night stands!  Barring that, at least throw the thing in a holster, yeah you have to remove but you know what, it’s better than say, shooting yourself in the chest.

Some how you managed to hook your booger hook on to the bang switch and pull the trigger on a double action revolver. There’s a rule 3 violation.

Some how you allowed the muzzle to cross your shoulder.  That’s a rule two violation.

It requires two of the four rules to be violated for someone to injure themselves or another.  While sleeping, if you have a gun in the manner described you can not obey rule two.  The gun is going to move as you sleep.  If you have it out of a holster you cannot obey rule 3.  You can inadvertently touch the trigger.  So I would say that over all this is a rule 1 violation as well because it is something you shouldn’t do with a loaded gun and all guns are always loaded right?  So you shouldn’t be doing that!

I would suggest learning from Darius Des Voigne’s Cletus’s mistake.  If for some crazy reason you were doing the same as him, let this be a lesson to stop doing it.  Less you do the same to yourself at which point we will all laugh at you and when we’re done laughing we’re going to be pissed for providing more ammunition to the enemy about gun owners being irresponsible.

Accidents do happen and the four rules prevent it.  Obey them and drill them till you can do them in your sleep.