Day 15 – Wednesday 8th June – Cable Dolly? Cable Dummy more like!
After the previous day’s lack of monkeys I was anxious to get more footage, but after searching the whole mountain for 2 and a half hours Sandra had told everyone to head back to the car. I was thinking the worst… maybe they’d been displaced by another troop, or moved into a new range? What if we didn’t find them again?!? Luckily this was my imagination running away with me, and by sheer luck the Macaques were spotted just off the track back to the car. We picked up their trail up and followed them to the “UK”. This was a perfect time for me to try out my cable dolly. First I wanted to see if I could make an ascender from the pulley and rope I had. I messed around for a bit and made something that work in tests without the camera attached. The only problem was fixing the pulley to the tree securely.
My equipment
The ascender on the tree without tripod head or camera attached.
Soon the infants were playing in the trees and I was distracted from further tests of the ascender dolly. I got some nice footage of the hyperactive, adventurous infants.
After lunch I decided to try out the cable dolly between two trees in the traditional cable dolly style. The dolly platform is made from parts from an Aldi bike pulley system that cost me the princely sum of £5! (Certainly nothing like this) I’d bought 40 m of lightweight rope from Decathlon to save weight and space, and to allow a long movement of the dolly. The rope was the downfall of the whole plan. It felt strong enough when I bought it, but over 40m when stretched between trees the rope was extremely stretchy. The weight of the dolly rig (all 2kg of it) stretched the rope so much that the camera hit the ground. Even after tightening the rope as much as I could it still happened. Defeated and frustrated at the stretchy rope I gave up on the dolly Idea. I now know why the pros use wire rope at high tensions! Definitely needs a bit more R&D.
Aerial Acrobatics
Juvenile in dappled light
Sandra and the monkeys
Awwww!
Back at the apartments Neal asked if I would trim his hair. The weather was now starting to change from rain to the more traditional summer weather of sun and Neal’s copious hair was getting too hot for him. I was happy to oblige and we put Chris’ clippers on charge. After about an hour we thought we would be good to go, so Neal moved through into the bathroom and I started. I removed about an inch from in front of his ears, then the clippers promptly stopped! Lucky I hadn’t gone straight for the front! We put them back on charge and Neal escaped to a proper barber to have the job done properly (read about the consequences here)!
Neal - Pre haircut!