Day 27: Altimeter

West Coast Treasure
On Cullery Track in the winter rain,
Treasure is what we set out to gain!
On a Punga Island by a large wet log,
We start our search in the gravely bog.
A water u-tube and an estimate best made,
A metal detector, hope and a rusty spade.

Today, Ellen and I were given the treasure challenge - we have to develop an altimeter in order to get information on how to find the gold! Kathy is setting up a sluice to process the black sand and the two Mikes are making mercury and extracting as much gold as they can from the rocks they have accumulated.

Kate gave us a treasure map and told us that a helicopter would take us to a frozen lake about 1000m away where we would get out and have to climb 100m in altitude and find the buried treasure. We could use the metal detector we had made previously to help us.

Later on these instructions were to be changed because of the weather.

Ellen and I spend most of the first day with Kathy digging up the black sand on the amazing west coast beach. Had some fun generally taking it easy and playing around getting all the filming bits and pieces we need. Ellen and I do a spoof Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon on the beach but I am not sure if anyone else realised what we were doing! Anyway, we had fun ... such a great place to spend the day.

In the afternoon Ellen and I go up with Steve Evanson to Sentinel Point to see if we can use this hill as a known height to calibrate our altimeter. On the map it looks as if the height from the base to the look-out point is a 40m increase in elevation. End the day with Ellen and I being filmed talking about how the altimeter is going to work. Apparently it was very funny to see (and film).

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