An interesting travel day

It was a long and very challenging process getting everyone here to Pangnirtung on Baffin Island. First my crew were late getting to Iqaluit from Greenland and missed the flight to Pangnirtung so they went off to a hotel in Ottawa. Ulla Lohmann, a German photographer we are bringing in to participate, did make the flight, but then it didn't land because of low cloud, and returned to Iqaluit. Apparently this happens all the time, flying into Pangnirtung is like a lottery. Meanwhile the helicopter we are supposed to fly on tomorrow to reach our location also wasn't able to make it in from Iqaluit. They said they would try again later but that the forecast wasn't good. So now I was missing one plane, one helicopter, one crew, 12 cases of equipment and one German photographer. I went back to the lodge, where a few minutes later the cargo guy from the airport wandered in to grab a coffee, and told me the plane was going to try again to get in a couple of hours later. So I jumped on the phone immediately and got the crew to leave the hotel they had just finished checking into, hump all the cases they had just unloaded back into a taxi, and go back to the airport. They managed to get there just in time, made it onto the plane, and as I headed up to the airport to see if the plane would actually land this time, I looked across the fiord and to my great delight, saw the helicopter flying in. The helicopter pilot headed off to the hotel, and a few minutes later the plane actually made it in and landed. The crew made it in, the photographer made it in, the helicopter had arrived, everything was looking great, then I was told there was an issue and I better talk to the helicopter pilot. I went over to see what was up, there were three gaping holes smashed in the windshield. Some guy had come onto the tarmac, high on something, shouting and screaming, and had decided to vandalize it. He had thrown three enormous rocks right through the front bubble. The police had caught the guy, but the helicopter is dead. For days. The whole thing we came to shoot is not going to happen. So that's how my day went. Now I'm looking for other stuff to fill our time.

  Picture by Ulla Lohmann