The Outback Wrangler

by Matt Wright

  ‘Tara, this is Matty. Do you copy?’ I asked.

  ‘Loud and clear, Matty,’ she said.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. I told her that I’d been involved in a little incident and needed her advice. I gave her my coordinates and she was overhead within a couple of minutes.

  ‘How do I look from up there?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t think you are getting out in a hurry.’

  ‘Listen, can you radio base for me?’

  ‘What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Just tell them I’ve had a minor accident. Make sure you tell them that nobody has been hurt and the helicopter is intact.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘We’ll need another chopper, some rigging gear and an empty fuel drum.’

  ‘No worries, Matt. I’ll get it sorted. I’d tell ya to have a good day but it looks like it’s started off pretty bad.’

  Tara radioed base. The boss sent out Mike Koloff to fix the problem. Mike was the company’s training pilot and one of the best sling pilots going round. He was regularly called on by the local fire department to sling water onto the raging wildfires Canada experiences in the summer months.

  The company’s engineer, Cory Hoover, came too, along with the boss, Zvonko Dancevic. Zonk, as we called him, was a veteran pilot who started Qwest up with his mate Cam Allan. He was seriously pissed off when he arrived. He had good reason to be. One of his choppers was in the water. If it stayed there overnight, it would have frozen. There were also big chunks of ice floating in the water. The longer the chopper remained in its current position, the greater the damage would be.

  He gave me an absolute spray. I wasn’t too fazed. I’d had a hell of a lot worse working for Milton Jones. He might have chewed me out for longer, but for the fact that the situation was quickly deteriorating. The spongy ground the skid was resting on was struggling to support the weight of the helicopter. It was slowly sinking before our eyes. There was no time to finger-point and level blame. We all had work to do.

  The first task was to get the chopper upright. That meant getting into the water. We all got into extra-insulated dry suits and stepped in. The water was waist deep and bitterly cold. It felt like knives were being thrust into my legs. For the next 30 minutes, we took turns picking out 30-kilogram chunks of ice that had come loose when the chopper landed. Once all the ice was clear, we jacked up the tail boom and rolled a couple of large pieces of timber under the skids.

  Progress was slow. The problem was the weight of the chopper. This is where the empty drum came into action. Using a hose, we sucked out three quarters of the fuel in the tanks. We also pulled out all non-essential items from inside the fuselage. If it wasn’t fixed into the helicopter, it was taken out.

  After a couple of hours, we had cleared enough ice under the chopper and taken enough weight out for Mike to attempt to lift it up. Using every inch of rope, I rigged the squirrel to the sling connected to Mike’s chopper. He was flying the AS350.

  The rigging drew out as Mike repositioned himself above the jet ranger. The ropes went taut as he very carefully started to lift the chopper out of the water. The Jet Ranger was too heavy for Mike to lift completely clear of the hole. We managed to slip a few pieces of large timber under the skids and stabilise the machine, but it remained partly submerged.

  ‘That’s great, Mike!’ I shouted into the radio. I unhooked the sling and gave him the thumbs up. Mike flew off to collect the surveyors higher up the mountain.

  I looked at the Jet Ranger. Water was lapping at the doors of the fuselage. It looked in a pretty sorry state. But I was confident that I would be able to fly her out.

  ‘So who’s coming up the front with me to help fly this thing out?’ I asked.

  Everyone laughed.

  ‘You’re on your own, Matt,’ said Zonk.

  I didn’t blame them for being worried. When the blades start turning on a chopper, things can be thrown out of balance. It was easy to imagine the chopper slipping off the timber during the start up. There was also the possibility the chopper had suffered damage to the undercarriage or the tail boom when it fell through the ice. There was no way of knowing until Cory conducted a full inspection of the aircraft. But I needed at least one person up front with me. The chopper’s resting position had pushed its centre of gravity towards the back of the machine. The more weight I had up front, the less likely the chopper would slip back.

  ‘C’mon,’ I pleaded. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Cory. It took guts for him to volunteer. It was something that sealed our friendship.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ I said.

  We climbed into the Jet Ranger and I hopped into the pilot’s seat. I’ll admit, there were a few nervous moments as I cranked her up and the blades started turning. There was no warm-up. I went straight to full throttle. Our improvised pad was so unstable, I figured the less time we spent on it the better.

  The chopper started to shudder. One of the timber logs was coming loose. I suppose I could have powered down. But this was our best chance. If I aborted now, the machine would most likely be stuck in this hole until the end of winter. It was now or never.

  It took about a minute for the gauges to come up to 100 per cent. I lifted up the collective and we slowly rose. Even though I had dramatically reduced the weight of the machine, the chopper felt heavy. Something was wrong. I looked at the instrument panel. There were no warning lights coming up or any other indication of a problem. It wasn’t until Zonk called me on the radio that I realised the problem.

  ‘Hey Matty,’ he said. ‘You’re towing a bit of a garden.’

  There was no way of seeing the reeds from my position, but someone took a photo and showed me later. The Jet Ranger looked like Luke Skywalker’s X-wing in that scene in The Empire Strikes Back, where Yoda lifts the spacecraft out of the bog in the Dagobah System. I kept the chopper in a low hover while the guys on the ground pulled off all the reeds. The improvement in the handling of the chopper was instantaneous. Once all the reeds were removed, I flew the chopper to a dry patch of land. Cory went over everything with a fine-tooth comb – the chopper was in perfect working order. More importantly, Zonk didn’t fire me!

  15

  Croc Bait

  In total, I spent four years in Canada. I would return to Australia towards the end of each year in preparation for the egg-collecting season. My first taste of collecting croc eggs at Moroak had left its mark. I was hooked. It became a yearly ritual that I continue to this day: a three-month adventure that bookends my year.

  People often ask me why I keep doing it. It’s a fair question. The risks involved are numerous and it isn’t as if the money is all that great. Although I’m a firm believer in egg harvesting as a conservation measure, that isn’t enough to draw me out year after year. It comes down to one simple fact. I love it.

  I love the thrill of clearing a nest while being stalked by one of the world’s greatest predators. I love the intense camaraderie with the boys, knocking back a beer and swapping stories at day’s end. Most of all, I love the challenge and adventure of the job. Taking part in any activity that takes you to your limits – that demands every shred of experience and physical endurance to perform and survive – is living life to the max. For me, that’s the only way to live.

  * * *

  The next couple of chapters recount some of my more memorable experiences collecting off crocodile nests. They are incidents that took place at some point in the 10 years I’ve been egg collecting and don’t necessarily run chronologically. They provide a glimpse of the life of a collector and give an idea of how the industry has evolved over the last decade. I’ll start with a technique of collecting eggs that is so dangerous it’s no longer used. We called it the floating mat method.

  Floating mat is a term collectors use to describe the native grass that grows at the edges of the big rivers and lakes of the Top End. The grass spreads out from the bank and across the wate
r and provides the perfect conditions for crocs to hunt. The floating mat is thick enough to support the weight of an animal, but not so thick as to prevent a croc from bursting through and dragging unsuspecting prey to the murky bottom. For this reason, floating mat is one of the preferred places for crocs to build nests and one of the most dangerous places for humans to venture.

  The nests are like little floating islands that are constantly patrolled from beneath. The moment an egg collector sets foot on floating mat, he or she is on a ticking time bomb. The crocodile feels the disturbance in the water and swims undetected beneath the mat. Stalking from below, the croc waits until the person stops moving. If the collector remains still for too long, he or she will be in the jaws of a crocodile before knowing what has happened.

  Collecting eggs on floating mat is all about speed – get in and get out. That means landing the chopper as near as possible to the nest and reducing the amount of time the collector stands on the mat. Large inflatable floats would be fitted to the skids. The pilot would keep the rotor spinning so that the chopper would remain light on the skids to enable a quick getaway. It’s easier said than done.

  Landing a chopper near a nest or hovering over a nest is never a good idea. The moment a female croc is exposed to the intense vibration or noise from the chopper she becomes shaken and confused. Usually, she will be panicked into making uncalculated launches into the air, snapping at anything and everything. You are better off landing away from the nest and coming in slowly and quietly by foot to cause minimal disturbance. Although this is a preferable method, it is time-consuming, inefficient and risky in other ways.

  Floating mat is by no means stable. At any minute, it might give way, leaving the collector waist-deep in water with a croc lurking and no easy avenue of escape. It also means a collector spends more time in the very place saltwater crocodiles like to hunt.

  On one occasion, I was sitting at the controls of my R44 waiting for a couple of blokes to clear a nest. Even with my eyes glued to the water, there was no warning of a crocodile lurking beneath the floating mat. The first I knew that we were being hunted was when a big female burst through the grass with jaws open and tried to take a chunk out of the chopper. After failing to get any purchase on the underside of the chopper, she turned her attention to the cockpit, leaping up and knocking the window with her head.

  Both of the blokes on the nest saw what was happening and dived for the chopper. They seemed to take an age to get completely inside. It took all my restraint not to pull up. A passenger is either in a chopper or out of a chopper, never half and half. If you take off with a person off balance while standing on the skids, that person will probably die.

  ‘Hurry the fuck up!’ I shouted.

  Once everyone scampered aboard and strapped in, I pulled up. The croc had her head resting on one of the skids and was lifted off the ground for a second before falling back in the water. That was a close one. But not nearly as close as the day Bluey decided to bring his 16-year-old daughter Rainey on a day of collecting eggs on a floating mat out at the Moyle River near Coolibah. How nobody died that day is a miracle.

  Located in the northwest corner of the territory, the Moyle cuts across seasonally inundated grassland. It’s remote, swampy and full of crocs. Milton was flying with Bluey in one of the R44s. Meanwhile, I was flying Rainey in the R22. In placing his daughter in my chopper, Bluey was entrusting her safety to me. I hated every bit about that day. I’m all about fostering interest in wildlife among young people, but clearing nests on floating mat is no place for a 16-year-old.

  Not that Rainey seemed bothered. She was having a blast, leaping around on the mat and carefully loading up her crate. I was sat at the controls keeping the chopper steady, with a pistol at my feet. By now I had cleared enough nests on floating mat to know that there was no way of accurately predicting where an attack would come. Having a gun nearby was a necessary precaution.

  Rainey had done a good job. We had been going all morning and were approaching lunch. Rainey was filling up one last crate before we returned to the house to unload. The moment she strapped the crate in the chopper and leapt inside was a huge relief. Maybe we would get through this day without incident.

  ‘Let’s go back and get some lunch,’ I said.

  ‘Sounds good,’ she said.

  As we were getting airborne, Rainey pointed towards Bluey, who had just exited Milton’s chopper and was about to clear another nest. Rainey was pulling out her camera and preparing to take a photo when a huge croc burst through the floating mat out of the water and grabbed her dad around the chest. The pain must have been incredible, but Bluey’s face remained impassive. The split second it took for the croc to burst out of the water was like something out of a Hollywood movie. Rainey screamed.

  You always know the danger is there but seeing it in action takes your breath away. I’ve had a lot of close calls with floats torn off and seats ripped out but seeing someone getting taken makes you realise how dangerous the work really is.

  As Bluey was being taken towards the water, years of experience around crocodiles must have kicked in. He reached for his gun with his free hand while the croc tried to drag him into the water. Milton brought the chopper in a hover above Bluey, which scared the croc, who freed Bluey and took off. Bluey was unbelievably lucky he wasn’t dragged into the water. All I could think was thank Christ it was Bluey and not his daughter. A slight girl like Rainey would not have stood a chance.

  I remained nearby in a hover to see if they needed assistance. Bluey waved his arm to indicate he was okay and it was safe to land. Milton and I both landed quickly on some hard ground to inspect Bluey’s wounds. Perfect teeth marks etched into his torso. He also had a couple of deep lacerations across his chest about an inch deep and some cuts in his back. He was understandably pretty shaken and we weren’t medically qualified to know what the real damage was. Milton and I carried Bluey into the 44.

  ‘Meet us at Palumpa,’ Milton said.

  A remote Aboriginal community, Palumpa has a small medical facility and was about 15 minutes away. Rainey and I were dead quiet on the flight. From our perspective, it looked pretty bad. Surviving the initial attack didn’t mean Bluey was out of danger. Crocodiles have a lot of power in their jaws and crushing down on a human torso could damage a lot of things.

  On the way there I called the local clinic so the nurse could meet Milton’s chopper on arrival. Milton pushed his chopper to the absolute limit, arriving a few minutes before us. After landing, Rainey and I raced into the clinic.

  We pushed through the doors and to our astonishment, there was Bluey standing up with a bandage round his chest and a smile on his face. Rainey ran over and gave her dad a hug. Not many people end up in the jaws of a crocodile and live to tell the tale. Bluey is a hard old bastard, particularly when you consider he was back on a nest an hour later!

  16

  The Sling

  It was clear the days of the floating mat method were numbered. We needed to come up with something new – something that improved safety, allowed the collectors to access the hard-to-reach nests and improved efficiency. Our solution was to start slinging collectors directly onto nests.

  Long lining or slinging is a very efficient way to utilise a helicopter, whether it’s fighting fires, logging or egg collecting. The slings I use consist of a high-tech polyethylene fibre capable of carrying up to 10 tonnes. This is massive overkill when your chopper can only carry around 350 kilos. Nevertheless, it gets the job done and keeps the fellas safe.

  Slinging a collector onto a nest is all about reducing the time they are exposed to danger. In the early 1980s, when people began collecting crocodile eggs, they’d use a chopper to spot a nest and then land the collectors as close as possible. This was often kilo­metres away, requiring the collectors to walk into the swamps with only a rod and crate to keep them safe. It was very dangerous. They were exposed to heat exhaustion, deadly snakes and large male crocodiles patrolling the swamps.<
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  Today, thanks to special conditions permitted to us from CASA, we’re able to use the slinging technique with a double-hook set-up underneath the chopper. This means that the collector being slung underneath the chopper has a back-up hook if one breaks. We’re the only people in the world sanctioned with these permissions and it makes our job a heck of a lot safer.

  Using the slinging technique, we drop the collector into a nest where they unhook themselves and the chopper flies away. A collector must have all senses working to increase safety. If the helicopter remains hovering above the nest while the collector clears the nest, the engine drowns out the sound of approaching danger. Once the crate is filled, the collector will call the pilot back. The chopper returns, the collector reattaches to the sling and is winched off.

  Being able to hop from nest to nest in this way is far more efficient, resulting in better daily yield of eggs. Plus, the collector conserves more energy, avoiding the long slog through cane grass and swamps. Approaching the nest from the air rather than by land also feels safer. From above, a collector often gets a visual of a crocodile and can better evaluate the risks of any given nest. If the guy on the sling feels the nest is too dangerous then he radios up to the pilot to move off.

  But in terms of safety, the sling method is not foolproof. There are fairly obvious risks involved when you dangle a bloke from a 100-foot rope – otherwise known as a dope on a rope – and lower him onto a crocodile nest. For one thing, the weather becomes a real factor. The best sling pilot cannot predict a sudden gust of wind that might throw the collector into a tree or landing too hard on the nest. But the major downside of using a sling is exposure. Once the collector unclips from the harness, he is on his own. If he gets himself into trouble, only he can get himself out of it.