News

Memory of the month the way things were. (Part Twenty One)

Canada No 6

I should have paid tribute before to the sites unsung heroes without whom the rest of us would not have been able to do our job, namely the catering staff who produced outstanding food as good as any four star hotel 24/7 365 days a year, they really did us proud. 

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With the ice gone the only way off the island was by the barge or work boat, so the big dragline had to go on it and fully kitted out and was pretty heavy, too heavy I thought and so it proved to be. Once loaded the barge was really low in the water the difference can be seen in the photos. 

As it headed downstream the current came into play and it was too much for the small tug, as soon as he tried to come into the landing point the current pushed it down stream until he managed to get to the bank half capsized, had the front not touched the rocks underneath the whole thing would have gone over.

Fitter Ken Barnard and I were sent via the workboat to assist in recovering the situation on arrival we got a loader and dozer from the dam site and I made a ramp for the machine to get off the barge.  We had to wait for the operator to arrive, this chap had his own plane and used to fly from job to job, you don’t get that in the UK!

The fitter decided to have a nap in the pickup laying across the bench seat with his feet hanging out the passenger door, while I sat in the Cat 988 reading, a movement caught my eye up the track and I could see six wolves heading towards us, getting closer they looked in fine fettle so I kept still to see what would happen. The lead animal started sniffing the fitter’s feet and others were milling about less than eight feet from me, I had my foot on the air horn just in case they decided the fitter looked good to eat but they just trotted off up the track, Ken was certainly surprised when I told what had happened. When the operator arrived, we managed to get some ropes on the barge to pull tight to shore and get the dragline clear of the ramp support, this allowed him to very slowly creep up the ramp onto land but it was dodgy for a while.

I wanted to stay over a year for tax purposes and by then the dam sluices had been closed and the water was rising fast and it was race to dismantle the camp before it flooded.  By now I was the only operator left on Ominawin island and our crew had moved to the Jenpeg dam site to eat and sleep and returned up river each day on the barge, most machines had gone except for a D6 and forklift.

I was running the Bucyrus Eyrie 30B tracked crane but some of the freezer and kitchen modules were too heavy to lift, as a last resort I did think of chaining the forklift to the back as an extra counter weight, however, I put the stick straight up ignored the bells and lifted it anyway, there was no other option, in the field you do whatever it takes. We got the artics to back under the load as I dared not move or the crane would have gone over and that way we were able to clear everything, by the end we were working in water so it was a bit tight. 

After that I was asked to stay on permanently and work up through the company to run all the earthmoving operations, I would have had to go home and apply for a residents permit but with the company backing it would have been a mere formality, this would have been a wonderful opportunity so I had a major dilemma, this was whether to insist Angela come with me to Canada permanently, or I could stay there and go back to England every six months or so or return home, in the end I decided it would not be fair to take Angela to a foreign country drop her off somewhere she knew nobody and go thousands of miles away for ninety days at a time, so I had to say no.

That was certainly the biggest mistake of my life given the way England has been completely ruined by weak and incompetent self-serving politicians, coupled with the EU and unfettered mass immigration leading to companies addicted to paying rock bottom wages and not training their own staff. It was with mixed feelings that I left the job having been on site for over seven months I was sad to leave but looked forward to seeing my wife. The co-operator