1990 was my last trip to Scotland, but this time I had a job lined up for a few months with Dollar Helicopters, working Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and one job in England. This was a great working holiday, despite having no bike this time.
The helicopter job lasted longer than expected. Most of my time was spent driving a Mercedes Unimog mobile crane. It was my own personal tourist bus; I always kept the windscreen clean, and could see over all the hedges, being so high up.
The season started with fish-farming—flying smelts from the freshwater tanks to the sea cages. This was followed by some small farming jobs, but the main job was forestry. Where soils were lacking in nitrogen, causing slow growth in the trees, we would spread sand from Tunisia and Morocco, and sometimes also a bit of urea, to speed up growth. I saw a lot of countryside doing this job, and I was able to see private countryside and forests that did not have public access. We had our own caravan for accommodation, with two of us doing the loading work and a rotating pilot and engineer.
The job lasted a total of ten weeks, with three trips to Ireland. I spent a lot of my time in Ireland frequenting local villages and pubs, and we ate very well. In Northern Ireland, we had to camp in military compounds and were always searched for bombs. The helicopter was at one point used by the IRA to conduct a prison escape—the company received a thank you card in the mail.
We had a contract for Western Ireland, which we completed, but an Irishman had the East. When starting, he crashed and burned his helicopter, so back we went to complete the East. We did Scotland as well, especially the West and Western Isles, and finished in Wales. We were mostly ground crew there, but I got some great flying time anyway.
After the job ended, I returned to Ohakune, but I decided to do no more pulp or paper mill work, as it’s bad for one’s health. I reduced my drawing work to local town work, as there was no resident architect or engineering draftsperson in Ohakune and I had already spent many voluntary hours on the town’s Main Street project.