Annual 'Copter Ride

Dean and the Squirrel doing GPS runs

Finally got a still morning, and AeroWork's Dean Lithgow was on the ball, turning up to do the annual gorse run in the Squirrel, a nice smooth machine.
Its a long shot from early days of Alexander Helicopter's Bell, (aka the ones you see in Mash *** re-runs), piloted by Rex Sherlock. It was quite a novelty in those days, I got the show-around-the-place rides as a school kid, one time hooking the skid under a cast ewe to flip her on her feet, and another being heroically delivered to school.
The old man used to do it but he got put off the time they were puttering up a gully when the power board high tension lines suddenly appeared in front of the perspex bubble, this was in the days when the industry didnt think about those things. Rex dropped the chopper 12' in a fraction of a second, and went through underneath, but the impression was significant enough, the old man delegated me to do the spotting from then on.

Re-loading

Rex further expounded about the time he was doing a job in a remote part of the Waitotara Valley, when he got a skid entangled in the telephone wires beside the road, and try as he might backing up and dropping and lifting, the wires wouldnt let go of him.
As extreme good fortune had it, the P&T, on a rare occasion, happened to be doing line maintenance less than a mile away, and on hearing the chopper working so close the men decided to go and spectate. Lucky they still had their ladders on the truck.
Back to the gorse, last years spray-up was done in Jan, a bit late in my book to catch the best of the growing fronds, at 7 litres Eliminate (Ravensdown's Grazon equivalent) per ha. While the kill wasnt 100% I was happy enough with the foot or so knock-back in bush height. I was also amenable to Dean's suggestion to do 8 litres on some of the heaviest this time, but I think being on the button with the November timing will see it brown off pretty good.