"Sounds like a plan" I replied "Lets make it easy cause the only truck I got running is the big Paj. So what's say we just do a quick run down the river"
"Aye, good idea, lets do that then" chortled Mr Ice.
And that was how it started, a seemingly innocent conversation, a simple arrangement, the makings of a disaster of epic proportions!!!!!
Typically a couple of days before hand I get the obligatory call from Mr Ice. "We've goot a small problem"
"Oh no" I said "Don't tell me Mrs Ice has dropped her Iphone down the dunny again?"
"No, it's more serious than that" he replied
"Wow" I thought, "this has got to be bad"
"The frost plug at the very back of the engine has sprung a major leak, and the only way to fix it properly is to take the head off" bemoaned Mr Ice.
"Bugger" I said
"But don't worry" Said Mr Ice, "I'll try fixing it with some silly putty I got here"
Two hours later we were good to go. The man is a legend....
So me and Mr Ice met at Maraekakaho at 10am and waited for the others to turn up, which they didn't of course, the slackers. Wingnut was still waiting for all the kings horses and all the kings men to fix his back, Clive couldn't drag his sorry arse out of bed and Buzz was just missing in action.
Think it might be time for a lecture on commitment lads!!!!!
Anyway the two of us set off and approached the first river crossing, which we made it across without a problem, and that was about the only time we didn't have a problem for the rest of the day
Turns out a stock standard gen 2 paj has all off road ability of a squashed frog, so the next small crossing it wound up a bit stuck......
Not too worry, Mr Ice got across at a slightly different spot and pulled me out with out too much trouble.
Then Mr Ice spent a bit of time flexing out his fancy suspension and looking cool
So that Mr Ice didn't have to pull the Paj out of every river crossing I employed the age old, tried and tested, almost never fails, "bury ya foot to the floor" 4WDriving technique
This can very effective but still did not always guarantee I made it across......
Although the kids thought it was hilarious, especially when all the water went straight over the bonnet, the front windscreen and then through the open sun roof
And then we still had to be pulled out.....
We were actually doing really well, almost 45 minutes had passed since we started and we were still moving and apart from me getting stuck in the river every few minutes we had had no major disasters.
But as you will all know by now, when me and Mr Ice go 4WDriving this situation can never last and sure enough the inevitable happened 5 minutes later.
Mr Ice lined up what looked like a small crossing and should have been a piece of cake, a walk in the park, a gentle stroll by the river so to speak, except when you forget to check the depth of said small river crossing............
So into the breach dived (literally) Mr Ice, water went up over the bonnet, over the windscreen, over the roof, as Mr Ice bravely went in search of the titanic.
Needless to say when it gets that deep in such a short crossing the climb out the other side is a little steep and the mighty rangie didn't have a chance.
Mr Ice tried going backwards, but that didn't work either, so went forwards again, and then backwards and then forwards again and only succeeded in burying the now struggling Rangie deeper into the river bed.
Up until this point things were still all good however. It was then that things took a turn for the worse.
You see because the Pom's live in a country that sometimes doesn't see the sun for 6 months of the year, sometimes their thinking can get a bit foggy. This is where the term "Foggy Bottom" comes from. When there had been a particularly long stretch of sunlessness that would send a few of the pom's into a foggy state, when they got so bad they couldn't even wipe their own arse, it was said that they were at a "Foggy Bottom", and would be sent away to a certain part of the country that was even more depressing than the rest of England to recover.
This place was where they built all the Rangerovers. And if they never recovered and stayed there long enough they got to become engineers and design and build Rangerovers. True story........honest........
Anyway one of these clever chaps thought up the brilliant idea of sticking the second most important thing next to the air intake, the ECU, on the floor under the front seat. Feck'n Brilliant!!!!!!!!!!
Then just to make sure that the dammed thing was definitely going to get wet the first time you went through a puddle, they made sure the doors wouldn't seal properly. At least in the Pajero you can get stuck in the river and as long as you climb out the window it will stay dry inside.....No wonder Hitler packed such a mental when they replaced his Pajero with a Landy...
Anyway by the time I managed to get anywhere close it was all over bar the winching as the motor was dead as a Leman Brothers executive dropped in the Bronx.
Except that winching wasn't an option because the battery in the Rangie wasn't too flash either so there was no winching to be had under any circumstances. Couldn't swap it with my battery as mine was on the way out also and that would have just meant we would have two dead trucks in the river instead of one.
So we tried the old dig and tug method for about 10 minutes and then realised that wasn't going to work as it was going to take about 4 hours of snatching to get it out, and we only had one decent snatch strap and even if we managed to get it out of the hole it was in there was no way the Paj was going to be capable of towing the Rangie out to any sort of sealed road anyway.
It was fair to say we were up S%^T creek big time
Part two, the rescue, shortly
