Hunting with Satphones
Signal fires, 100-mile treks to civilization, stone messages arranged on a beach — these are the makings of a great wilderness survival movie. You know how it goes: a turboprop plane drops off a mid-life-crisis sufferer and his kid in northern, remote Canada, with instructions to pick-up in two weeks. Something goes horribly wrong—an animal attack, storm, disease, alien invasion, whatever— and the team is forced to reach safety or survive until the plane returns.
But these plot lines may be a thing of the past. From a recent bear-hunting journal:
Wallace got off two shots from his .375 H&H Browning A-bolt rifle — a loaner from Lanning.
Even the guides couldn’t believe the size.
“You could tell it was big at 150 yards,” Wallace said about the distance that he shot. “But when we got down there, we just stood around for awhile looking at each other and wondering ‘what the heck have we done?’ It was just a huge, just a huge bear.
“Both of the guys had guided for years, and they both said ‘that’s the biggest bear.’ They said it was just a monster.”
Starting at about 6:30 p.m., the foursome packed the hide — an estimated 130 pounds of bearskin — and skull back to camp.
“They looked at the animal and figured it was about a 1,000-pound bear, easily,” Wallace said.
Back in camp, the call back to the lodge was a tough sell.
“They got on the satellite phone and said ‘hey, come and get us,’ ” Wallace recalled, then added with a chuckle, “they thought that we wanted to move, but we said ‘no, we got them both.’ And they didn’t believe us.”
Sat-phones have become so convenient for these types of expeditions that they are standard equipment for many outfitters. Even Greenpeace’s Papua New Guinea project is using satellite phones for emergencies and to, yes, submit their daily blog entries:
Our electricity is produced using three separate sets of solar panels. During the day, the panels charge car which in turn provide power to charge laptops, GPS devices, satellite phones, cameras and the lights we use in the �office� while writing blogs at night. On cloudy and rainy days, we are extra-careful not to waste our valuable energy.
One of the satellite phones is based at the camp at all times. It is our connection to the outside world and necessary for emergencies. Calls are very expensive so I don’t phone home. Once a day we check e-mails via satellite phone and send out our weblog entries.
Maybe Really Rocket Science could spring for a blogging-sat-phone. I’d like to make my entries from the South Pacific too.
