FOBB’03 – Challenges In The field At 'Bumblebee Island'

For FOBB’03, my XYL Claire and I had obtained permission to land on a small island at that time unnamed at the Monee Reservoir, in Monee, IL.

How small? Just 40-feet by 20-feet.

We had loaded our 46 pound tandem kayak to its limit for this one 4 hour event of the year.

We landed at 11:30 am, and discovered a really tangled setup. A tiny beach of about four-feet by five-feet was the only sensible landing spot on this tiny island. By then we had named it "Bumblebee Island" which is probably the only positive thing that came out of our attempt.

One tree looked pretty good for an antenna. The other had been hit by lightning at some earlier time. And just as I was figuring out how to get the wire up, I heard the first rumblings of thunder to the Northwest.

Having had a particularly lousy experience with lightning in the past – I’d lost a DX-100 to a line surge – I didn't like the look of things. The sky darkened quickly and in about 5 minutes and we decided to reload the kayak and get out of there, and off the water.

The storm that hit ran from 12 noon till 4 p.m., dumped 4 to 5 inches of water on the Southern reaches of the Chicago area – and completely shut me down. No way was I going on the air back home.

The accompanying photographs show:

Claire and our kayak prior to loading

At the dock, ready to get out to Bumblebee Island

Bumblebee Island

The resident guard at Bumblebee

The island was uninhabited until now!

Here it comes . . . !

The little radio that couldn’t . . . Note the small homemade key.

This is silent BB No. 150 signing off . . . Maybe next year.
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Bob Wiest, W1ZZL, is a QRPer living in Crete, IL. He can be contacted at: bobwiest@earthlink.net