Afternoon Newbie Desert Drive - Maliha (Sharjah) - 14 Mar 2020

[Frederic]

10 hours ago, Ale Vallecchi said:

Just returned home after a long and intense weekend of driving. I take this opportunity to thank Gaurav for both his drives (yesterday Fewebie and today's Newbie). Both great fun, and useful, to always learn something new, face new challenges, and become more confident (yet safe) drivers. Today's was another drive that gave us a bit of night time driving preview, but  was well worth it. Enjoy this week's rest, as next weekend we should all be back at it. 

Thanks for your support Alessandro. You're always around, never shy to help, and it's a blessing having you in any convoy of the club !

[Michael sammy]

Thx @Gaurav for the great leadership and support. And thx for everyone joined the drive yesterday and made it fun safe drive 

Truly enjoyed my day.

[Rahimdad]

14 hours ago, Chaitanya D said:

Saturday drive in Meliha was fantastic except for my tragedic sidee . 

Thanks @Gaurav, @Shamil @Xaf and @Ale Vallecchi for guiding the convoy. 

@Chaitanya D what happened during your sidey, what was so tragic?

[Kalahari]

Great drive again!  Thanks @Gaurav for coming to my rescue while I was (voluntary!!) enjoying the view from the top of the dune. Weather was great and it was good to see so many on Fossil Rock. Hope the 4Runner is ok?
PS: can anybody help me with a link to load pics in the gallery? I keep getting error 200?

[Desert Dweller]

Thank you @Gaurav for a very fun and exciting drive! This time I noticed the importance of having a variety of tools available 🛠 

@Shamil has earned the promotion, running to the rescue of us newbies, offering guidance and definitely taking action when needed.

@Ale Vallecchi and @Xaf were also quick to respond and offer their expertise. Thank you for staying behind, allowing the rest of us to cross to the other side without delay!

@Kalahari sorry for overtaking while climbing to the top! You can always show that there are no hard feelings by sharing the video you took of my car 😏. By the way, for some reason I also got error message while uploading pictures if I leave the page when they’re still uploading. I found that if I stay on the page it uploads fine.

Again, met great people and a promising team of Newbie drivers!

see you all next week!

 

[Chaitanya D]

1 hour ago, Rahimdad said:

@Chaitanya D what happened during your sidey, what was so tragic?

@Rahimdad I was doing a beginner sidee on the lower part of slope and rode over a bump ...I am not sure if I can say this was a mistake?

I had taken precautions for front bumper but unfortunately the back bumper came out from right side with some external plastic broken from the back.

Thanks to @sheri, @Michael sammy , @Shamil for helping me to kind of fix it (or rather remove it hahaha) so that I completed the full ride...I was amazed at the equipments they were carrying including a battery operated drill .

Meanwhile I had a nice welcome ceremony  at home when my little one accompanying me spilled the beans to my better half who became a fiery half instantly. 

See you and everyone soon , I hope i will get this bumper issue fixed by that time.

[Rahimdad]

@Chaitanya D a small gift for the desert gods, thank God you were doing it from the lower side to give you a feel. indeed our team is well prepared and if you are bitten by the desert sand you will be amazing someone in future with all the equipment you will be carrying to help out the Newbies.

[Jefy]

While I am writing this I am on standby for Alexander - 4Runner, I promised him if he needs help that I'll back him up.

Normally I avoid to write failures in public, because it can put somebody in embarrassment. The reason why I decided to do it, is because this can happen to everybody.

Unfortunately the 4-Runner got a transmission problem during the climb on the hill. It was not possible to engage any gear anymore.

We decided that I would stay behind with Ale and Alexander. Gaurav and Shamil would lead the group out of the desert and in the meanwhile I would try to pull the 4-Runner at least on a flat track and as close as possible to the road.The Idea was to get the car at least on a flat surface, so we could start pulling the 4 Runner from the nose.

When we started pulling the car from the nose, Ale was guiding me through the least difficult track. As you can remember, it was not easy to enter, neither it was to get out.
4 high was not sufficient, neither 4 low, I had to engage the rear diff-lock as well, otherwise I was just digging myself in.

We came to a point were I was not convinced I could make it without pulling the 4-runner in more problems. 
Ale and I made the decision to wait for Gaurav who has much more experience than us 2 together and let him explore the area to wait for his opinion.

Gaurav came back with an option to get out, but before we decided to do it, we discussed the risks. We think Alexander made a good call not to do it and first let a mechanic look at it and if the mechanic can't fix it to ask a recovery company.

Unfortunately the mechanic couldn't fix the 4-runner so they asked a recovery company to get the car out of the desert. In the meanwhile Alexander texted me that the car is out of the desert and shared pictures of the recovery. The car was recovered with a Rangerover only. I feel a bit embarrassed that we couldn't mange it yesterday, but as I said, it was the risk involved why we decided not to do it yesterday. 

 

 

 

 

[Ale Vallecchi]

1 minute ago, Xaf said:

While I am writing this I am on standby for Alexander - 4Runner, I promised him if he needs help that I'll back him up.

Normally I avoid to write failures in public, because it can put somebody in embarrassment. The reason why I decided to do it, is because this can happen to everybody.

Unfortunately the 4-Runner got a transmission problem during the climb on the hill. It was not possible to engage any gear anymore.

We decided that I would stay behind with Ale and Alexander. Gaurav and Shamil would lead the group out of the desert and in the meanwhile I would try to pull the 4-Runner at least on a flat track and as close as possible to the road.The Idea was to get the car at least on a flat surface, so we could start pulling the 4 Runner from the nose.

When we started pulling the car from the nose, Ale was guiding me through the least difficult track. As you can remember, it was not easy to enter, neither it was to get out.
4 high was not sufficient, neither 4 low, I had to engage the rear diff-lock as well, otherwise I was just digging myself in.

We came to a point were I was not convinced I could make it without pulling the 4-runner in more problems. 
Ale and I made the decision to wait for Gaurav who has much more experience than us 2 together and let him explore the area to wait for his opinion.

Gaurav came back with an option to get out, but before we decided to do it, we discussed the risks. We think Alexander made a good call not to do it and first let a mechanic look at it and if the mechanic can't fix it to ask a recovery company.

Unfortunately the mechanic couldn't fix the 4-runner so they asked a recovery company to get the car out of the desert. In the meanwhile Alexander texted me that the car is out of the desert and shared pictures of the recovery. The car was recovered with a Rangerover only. I feel a bit embarrassed that we couldn't mange it yesterday, but as I said, it was the risk involved why we decided not to do it yesterday. 

 

 

 

 

Hi Xaf. Good to hear of today's safe recovery. I still think the decision Alexander took was the wisest one. It was dark, and any tricky patch we encountered could have ended up causing much more serious damage. Even when exploring with Gaurav we took a couple of wrong turns, and ran into bushy areas.

Good calls were made: 1) attempting to tow the car out as far as we could; 2) quitting while we were still ahead. 

Also, it would have been too easy, especially for your powerful machine, to do the recovery in daytime. 🤪 After all, we are starting to enjoy these extra hour or two of night time driving.

[Gaurav]

Finally we have done the first ever Carnity drive on Saturday, thanks to all those who kept on asking on social media. I gather the courage to post a first test-out drive for Saturday and to my surprise we have had full house within first 3 days - 15 cars. After that I kept on getting messages for allowing 1 more car and 1 more car repeatedly. 

As per the new convoy restriction from safety aspect, we all are supposed to keep the count to max of 15 cars in any single convoy. Irrespective of that, still few people made on meeting point and they just got lucky as few others didn't show up, which gave a chance to balance the equation fairly.

As it was an absolute newbie drive without a single absolute newbie, so I decided to bump up the level after first 30 minutes and to my surprise everyone managed very well and we all had plenty of roller coaster dunes, steep drops and side sloping in play area for fewbie and above level members.

By 5 PM we have reached the pylon track and started our final climb to Fossil rock to enjoy the breath taking sunset view with a best desert landscape for our selfies. Before 6 PM all cars made on top of fossil rock except one, our dear friend @Alexander Sarte as his trusted Toyota 4runner decided to give up half way up the climb. There was no sign of engine overheating or any other mechanical damage or accident but just it wasn't moving in any gear. We tried shifting to Lo and High but gear wasn't engaging and kept on making grinding noise as soon as we drop in D or any other gear.

With sunset almost there, we decided to split the team. @Xaf and @Ale Vallecchi started to help Alex by pushing  the 4runner to flat ground as Xaf explained above. On the other side, @Shamil helped me in moving rest of the car from fossil rock drop and we manage to reach the tarmac just before it gets dark.

After this test of time, we both rushed inside to coordinate efforts with others to get 4runner out to pylon track. Ale and Xaf did a wonderful job of doing the safest recovery as much as they could do and then stopped for sketching a new route. This approach is very important while doing any extreme recovery that every move you make should be well calculated and not based on emotions, aggression or chances. Once we joined them Ale showed me the path and we went ahead to correct a little and chalk out all options of our success rate to reach out.

We analyse all options and gave all option to Alexander to choose:

• Call your mechanic to inspect or fix on site
• Call AAA desert recovery to tug vehicle out
• We tug the vehicle out but in case any of our car get damage due to extreme recovery then Alexander will be responsible for that damage. Although we have same thing written in our roles and responsibilities here, but before carrying out such extreme recover that has 50% success rate, it was important for us to mention this in advance.

With Alexandar level headed approach, he decided to leave the car inside, Shamil was kind enough to drop them home and later Alexander came back with his mechanic in the night, which I assume didn't went well.

Today afternoon, he got the car out with the help of AAA recovery experts and more we can hear from him, whenever he is free to share more updates.

@Xaf I can understand your feeling but I think what Alexander did was the wisest decision to not to take a chance and let professional recovery experts handle the situation. Moving a dead weight of 2 ton vehicle over 2-3 km of dunes is extremely risky and complicated with our limited resources in hand and at night time. Of course such situation is not an every day story, sometime taking back few steps is a very good move, eventually. 

I hope his 4runner get repaired soon with least amount of downtime and expense.