Operation Claw-out

 So, in the last blog we had been forced to leave a feral feline fending for itself somewhere in the wilds of Makairo Track.  Well, we couldn't leave it there forever so last Saturday another expedition was undertaken to track down the wayward Tiger.

Plenty of planning took place during the week, equipment was prepared and a team of volunteers organised.  Colin came up from Waikanae in his work cruiser with a quad to carry all of his Tiger trapping equipment and Stephen also drove up from Wellington to join him in the cruiser.  Darren was more keen, riding down from Taihape (yes, there was rain) so he could have a bit of a scoot after the retrieval and I picked up Stefan on our way out of town.

Our convoy left Palmy around 9:30 and apparently I stuffed up by not stopping in Pahiatua for pastry and coffee but hey, we were supposed to be on a mission.  The rain had really sorted out the gravel roads out to the bottom of Makairo track and although it was a lot of fun in the ute, a big blue Yamaha would have meant even more fun.

After unloading the trailer and grabbing our gear we set off up the hill.  Colin probably enjoyed the quad ride more than I enjoyed the walk but hey, my gumboots got me up the hill.

Arriving at the wee clearing where we'd parked our bikes the previous weekend, we then went to find the Tiger.  

It's in there somewhere...

As it turned out, the big cat hadn't slunk off anywhere and was sitting there patiently awaiting some sort of attention.  After checking things out we made a wee plan and prepped the gear.

We ended up anchoring the quad to a decent tree and backed it back close the edge (it ended up sitting in the rut to the right of it in the photo above) so that the winch wire could be as vertical as possible and not need to drag across the ground.

Darren and Stefan also trimmed a bit of foliage back to give us a clearer path up the bank.

And then the winching began.  Initially we had the bike hooked up around top of the forks and Stefan and I stayed down below to steady the bike as it slowly climbed the hill.  Darren roped himself in so he could grab it once the Tiger started to poke it's head out of the hole.

Nope, I'm not sitting on it (photo: Darren)

About half way up, we paused to move the winch cable to the left footpeg and do some track maintenance to help get it up the more vertical bank near the top.

Photo sort of by Darren (he's hanging off the bank)

This pretty much got the bike out of the hole and to finally get it back onto the track itself we resorted to man-power and out she came.

Now all that remained was to see if the beast could be cajoled into life.  Initially things did not look good as there was very little life on the dash and no response from the starter button.  Eventually even the little bit of life we could see dimmed to nothingness - uh-oh, RIP battery...

Colin was dispatched to the ute to grab my battery pack and once we worked out how to use it we actually got the bike to fire up.  Darren then suited up to ride it out...

But unfortunately, it wasn't going to be that easy.  Darren accidentally stalled the bike and we couldn't get it to fire again off the battery or by attempting to crash start it so we were back to man power.

Darren and I ended up getting a decent bit of exercise pushing it down the hill.  This sounds easier than it actually was.  There were actually a couple of little rises (including a slip across the track) to negotiate and it was quite hard for me to see where I was putting my feet with a bike in my way - I was in and out of ruts and all over the place.  We were both happy to get to the bottom of the hill.

Loading it up onto the ute ended up being the easy bit.

Then it was time for a bit of a celebration before departing the scene.

Back in civilisation we just had to stop at the place where the ride started and finally deal to those pies we missed on the way over.

One last hop got us back to Palmy and around to Marty's to deliver the puddy-tat.  He was pretty happy to be reunited with it and is now hobbling around working through the list (a small one actually) of repairs needed to get the bike back on the road.  It'll probably be fixed before he is...

So, a slightly different sort of adventure for us but it was a lot of fun and really good to be able to get the bike out relatively easily and back into Marty's hands.  Also neat that we could organise all this ourselves (and that Colin had all the gear) and just get it done quickly rather than having to wait and pay for someone to do it.

Finally, here's some video of the extraction that I managed to get.  Unfortunately the camera blew over before the beast completely emerged but you'll get the idea 😁