Greetings from wet, humid Meekatharra! The spin off from the cyclone up north dumped a whole heap of rain last Friday night - 46mm at Meekatharra Airport. As I'd been working on the Air Core rig out at North Andy Well, Joe (one of the Geo's) and I headed out first thing Saturday morning to assess the damage. There were about 10 water crossings on the Great Northern Highway, some pretty hairy!
With just managed to get to the Air Core drillers camp, which was underwater and the safety officer had gotten bogged (typical) so we lent them our snatch strap and they owed us a slab of beer. So we headed back to Meeka for a quiet day - majority of hte people on site ended up driving back to Perth as not much can be done when wet.
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| The Diamond Rig - They started drilling today but won't be able to move holes for quite sometime! |
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| The Great Northern Highway |
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| Lots of water! |
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| Wet Wet Wet! |
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| The AC Drillers Camp. Needless to say all their swags were soaked.. |
So on Sunday morning Mark (another Geo) and I headed out to assess the damage and see how wet the tracks were. Most of the water was off the Highway, so we headed out towards where we were drilling and came across the Driller who had gotten himself bogged. To cut a very long story short, we ended up bogging all 3 utes and the truck so there were 8 of us stuck with no way to get out but walk! The drillers are a motley crew, a bunch of cowboys really, which means they pretty much do what they want and therefore don't listen to our suggestions of leaving the utes and getting the hell out of there!
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| A very stuck truck! |
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| What three bogged utes look like! |
After a long, hot (and hungover!) day, we decided to call it a day, leaving two Utes behind and a very stuck truck. Luckily our ute was the only one that wasn't bogged, so Mark and I finally returned to town for an afternoon nap!
In a totally unrelated matter... Angus has always asked me what the pubs in Meekatharra are like. I've been avoiding them of late (something to do with a wedding dress!!) after getting 'rained in' on Saturday, we all headed down for dinner followed by a blowout. We have 4 drill crews in town so they were all out, along with all the locals who had Sunday off (not us!!). But after dinner at the 'Commie' we pub crawled to The Royal Mail, where the jukebox was pumping out Lee Kernegan (not kidding) and everyone was getting stuck in the full strength beer, as due to liquor restrictions wasn't available anywhere else.
So here are some snaps to give you a bit more of an idea of what the Meekatharra night life is all about.. Bundy, Pool, Darts and swearing. Literally!
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| Think the RC boys might have had something to do with this! |
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| Playin' some darts |
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| The busiest I've ever seen it! |
