Those who’ve embarked on occasional DXpedition escapades like myself will appreciate that things sometimes go amiss that can throw a real spanner in the works; blunders are made, items are forgotten, errors occur…and on some trips more than others too!

Take my IOTA/LOTA tour trip to Goods Island in the Western Torres Strait Islands region (OC-138), half way between Papua New Guinea (101 Division) and Australia around 7 years ago for instance. Now this DX adventure as 43SD/AUS-080 will sure be difficult to erase from the memory bank. And for all the wrong reasons too!

This is what happened…

After clambering from a dinghy and onto the partly submerged, razor sharp reef surrounding the island, I waved goodbye to my local islander mate after a few trips to the beach lugging gear and watched as he powered off across the blue.

Next, I battled to the top of the 60 degree angle cliffside to the site of the Goods Island Lighthouse and a nearby WWII bomb shelter overlooking nearby islands (Hammond, White Rock, Friday and Prince of Wales) to set up camp. This bone jarring, elbow grazing, perilous, life threatening hike took three trips, each one over an hour in length. Other than the Kenwood TS-120S rig and other accessories, there was also the issue of a generator which weighed a tonne, fuel cans, a fully disassembled 3 element yagi antenna and a pole for tower purposes.

This particular DX-stination, though, had been my envy for almost 2 years so there was no way I was going to let it get the better of me and chuck in the towel. So instead, I forged ahead with the determination of a cattle tick that’d just finished a two week hunger strike to protest over excessive cattle dipping until I had everything bar the kitchen sink at the top of the cliff.

With the sun going down fast beneath the distant horizon and the wind kicking up in swirls and twisters over the headland which hurtled through the pane-less windows of the bomb shelter, I hurried to erect the antenna and establish connections to the all the right sources; power chord into genny and into power supply; leads into rig; coaxial cable into rig and into antenna; grounding wire into rod into ground etc.

By this time, blood sucking mosquitoes had fired up their engines at the sight of a fresh kill and were moving in like squadrons of fighter plains over a prime war zone target. This made setting up the AUS-080 station even MORE difficult but thankfully I had packed a can of tropical strength insect repellent for this very scenario! No worries!

Praising my own organisational nous, I paused for a few moments and, in near darkness, gave myself a good coating of protective bug armoury. I then continued going about my duties and assembled the last of the equipment until all was in readiness.

After a few minutes, however, I was dismayed to find the repellent was useless against the onslaught of bities. In fact, if anything, it attracted more and more mozzies to the bunker, all intent on getting their teeth into my delicious blood.

After around 30 minutes I was covered in bites from head to toenail and itching like crazy. To make matters worse, my skin had experienced a bad reaction to the insect repellent and had turned all slimy and sticky. So now, I was a scratching, slippery, slimy mess without a DX contact even in the log.

After turning my torch in desperation to the insect repellent, intent on a thick second coating, I was struck down in horror to see that the repellent was in fact a cooking oil spray aerosol bottle and that I had instead applied a massive overdose of frypan oil to my arms, my legs and my face.

Screaming in anger, I reached for the closest rag, which later turned out to be my only beach towel for the stay, and wiped as much of the greasy goo from my body as I could.

Fortunately, my weekend stay on Goods Island proved to be a successful one in DX terms with some nice opening into EU, AS, SA, NA and OC. It terms of creature comfort and energy expenditure, however, it was a complete and total disaster!

73 de Admin
Darren