Month from Hell
Well I headed up to Fort Nelson to pick up the screening plant that I delivered in August and paid for an overweight permit based on the same weights as when I hauled it up there. Needless to say that was a mistake as when I got up there it was filthy dirty and covered in ice and snow. I had the client clean the tracks and most of the mud off of it before I hooked on and headed for town. It was about one hour out of Fort Nelson in the helmut oil field area. When I got to town I drove accross the scale to confirm my weights and wouldn’t you know it they weren’t even close (51,000kg). Both hoppers were about one third full of snow and ice ( or so I thought) and because it was minus 10 degrees celcius I wasn’t going to get rid of that to easy. I decided to go for lunch with my best friend Dan whom I hadn’t seen in a few months at the local pub. After lunch we went to see a good friend of Dan’s to see if he would weld some mud flap brackets back on the end of the screening plant that hadn’t been replaced since I took it up there. When I got to my truck and the screening plant I noticed that someone had stolen my tool box that I’d stupidly left on my jockey box. After getting the mud flaps taken care of I bid Dan goodbye and headed for Fort Saint John to use the scale there to see if the weights were the same in case the scale in Fort Nelson was out a bit. Crossing the scale in Fort Saint John I found out the weights were the same so I spent another 70 bucks on top of the original 178 to upgrade the overweight permit. Oh did I foget to mention that I forgot the light bar for the back and had to buy some magnetic lights from Canadian Tire to have brake lights etc. Spent the night in Fort Saint John and headed out in the late morning after buying another set of lights and realigning the conveyor belt on the passenger side that broke loose and was sticking too far out from the screening plant. By the time I got to Prince George it was snowing pretty good and I went accross the scale with no problems (yeah). Decided to stop and do a load check and sure enough the lights weren’t working. After testing the circuit on the screening plant plug I determined that there was a broken wire somewhere and I wasn’t wasting my time tracking it down. I took a taxi to Canadian Tire and bought 120ft of trailer wire and wired it right to my tractor. The weather changed when I got to Quesnel and I decided to spend the night at a pullout between Quesnel and McLeese Lake. The temperature had warmed up considerably to plus 5. In the morning when I did my pretrip I noticed mud and ice all over the ground under the two hoppers so I climbed up to take a look and low and behold the snow and ice had melted to leave one third of a hopper full of mud and rocks in both. No wonder my weights were up they forgot to empty the unit (or maybe they didn’t). In any case I headed forward and was glad to get home. Bye for now.