ODDS’N’SODS — Drifters

Last night, Dan Boyd, Dr. Howard Lahti and I were swapping exploration stories over quite a few beers. Since I was still chuckling over one of their stories this morning, I decided to write it down and share it with your readers.

Howard was chief geochemist, and Dan was camp manager, on a substantial exploration project on Melville Island near the Arctic Circle. They flew into Repulse straight from another exploration project and immediately started organizing supplies and logistics. Within a very short time, they had a float plane in the air and headed north, with most of their summer supplies on board. It was when they started to make arrangements to unload the plane that they found they had a slight problem. All previous landings on the ocean had been on ice in the winter, and the cargo had been sledded over the snow to town. This was summer. There was no ice, no dock and not even a road to the ocean.

Nevertheless, Dan and Howard were an experienced and resourceful exploration team and had faced many previous challenges with a tight time schedule. Within an hour, they met with the Town Council and had a bulldozer and grader working on the road, as well as all the materials to build a dock. By organizing the entire town and working like madmen, they achieved the superhuman feat of building both a road and a dock before the plane finished its flight.

They were driving the last nail into their well-constructed floating dock, when the plane with their supplies finished its long flight north and landed on the ocean in front of them. All was fantastically great except for one slight detail. In their haste to build the dock, they had omitted to anchor it to shore. The tide had come in and while they were concentrating on driving in the last nails, and watching the landing plane, their dock quietly drifted away from shore. They were on a veritable raft that was floating out towards the plane.

To make a long story short, there was rapid activity on shore to get a rope. Dan and Howard both got wet, but they eventually secured their wayward construction and got their supplies, and the town of Repulse got a great new dock and a new road.

— William Pelton is a geophysicist in Denver.