Would you trust a home made parachute…..( part one )

Would you trust a home made parachute…….? .( part one )

This is a true story that happened back in the early 1980’s when I was asked if I would be interested in cooking for an autumn sheep muster gang on Camden Station up in the Awatere Valley Marlborough, at the time owned by Frank Prouting , a son of Malcolm Prouting ( senior ) of Mesopotamia….

I had been up to Franks place a couple times prior, flying in for a visit while passing, and Franks airstrip approach is one that is not for the faint hearted…

Approaching from the north, one needs to drop down and follow a narrow river gorge around a couple of bends then seeing the airstrip which is perched on a small flat terrace on a right hand bend, one needs to have the aircraft airspeed and flaps set fairly precisely, to aim for touch down as soon as there is airstrip under the plane, as around half way along the strip there is a dog leg and if the aircrafts airspeed is too high its a challenge to navigate and of course its not ideal to have too slow an airspeed on approach as there is a vertical cliff drop off should one miss…

The other end approach from the South heading north is over an established vine yard that is built right up to the boundary fence so not a good idea to tangle with that either, while again having to control the approach airspeed careful as to avoid that blastered dog leg in the middle.

Ok so here I am up at Franks a couple of weeks early to help prepare for the muster, in which we would be joined by two other chaps, experienced in chasing sheep around on steep hill country…

One of these chaps ran by the name of Graeme Register, and was better known as “Cash Register”, or “Cashy” while the other character was also named Graeme but Cooper as his last name, and he gained the nick name (as you will see as the story unfolds ) of “Food Scoop ) “

In previous years Frank had used his one and only horse on his station to pack all the food and guys gear from his homestead all the way out and up the Cam river to his back country Mustering hut, this taking a number of trips back and forth to achieve the result, but this year….. Frank had a brand new plan…..!

We had ordered the supplies to be bought up to the station via the mail van guy, which arrived a couple of days before, and Frank discussed this brand new idea, of parachuting the food out of his own 90 hp Piper cub aircraft that he kept in a hanger on the edge of the strip I mentioned earlier…

For several nights I could hear Frank in his spare room of his home busily sewing away at  something well into the wee small hours of the night, then one morning he emerged at breakfast time with his invention…..

I took one look at it… or should I say ….them….and burst out laughing…

Frank had gone out to his brand new Woolshed and precured two new synthetic wool bale sacks, bought them in doors and had carefully split these open at the seams then had sewn lots of 5mm nylon rope from every angle down to form his adaptation of a parachute….. actually he made two of these..

So the day before the Muster was due to commence, we carefully packed the heavier items such as bags of spuds,( Potatoes) in the bottom of two large chaff sacks, with the more vulnerable food items such as bread and veges nearer the top, then once full had sewn the bag closed and installed a D ring which attached to his parachute ropes…. sound good,?  read on…!

Now the second part of this plan, Frank had kept it to himself until the last minute…

All of a sudden I found myself become what is sometimes referred to as a “CRASH TEST DUMMY “.. yes folks guess who was invited to hop into the back seat of franks little Piper cub, and no sooner had I sad down when the first very large food sack was lifted in and placed on my lap…firstly it weighted a ton and secondly I couldnt see a bloody thing except extreme left of right view..

So Franks plan was to fly both of us and my lap load off his strip and out and up to the mustering hut location, where he indicated that he would do a very steep turn directly over the hut and yell to me when to throw the sack and rolled up attached parachute out… O GREAT… I thought..

So…. plane started with Frank in front of me in this narrow plane with the entry door which splits in half allowing the top half to clip up under the wing while the bottom half clips down onto the planes fuselage , next we are haring along his strip and Airbourne…

It took about 8 to 10 minutes of circling to gain enough height to head out up to the hill side site of his Cam hut, then Frank had a couple of goes at steep turns but alas both attempts we were no where near the hut, allowing for the airspeed of the plane when dropping to goods..

So a larger circle was needed, and he calculated the fall trajectory, and with me poised, he finally yelled…NOW….

Hiffing the bag and chute out, hoping like heck it didnt tangle with the planes tail, we continued to watch as the sack careered earthward at one hell of a speed, with the prototype chute looking like it only fully opened near the ground….heading back to the strip, and loading the second sack repeated the performance…

So next morning the other two guys and around a hundred dogs arrived and we all set out on foot with packs on our back up to the hut….four odd hours later arriving at the Cam hut…… O MY GEDDY AUNT>……….. guess what site greeted us….!

Part two coming soon…lol