Gone Fishin'

Ooops! I wonder how the driver managed to do that - launching a boat perhaps?

I hope he escaped unscathed.

........

Not ever so far from where I lived for years is a broad, nearly-flat sandy beach used until about the 1960s for testing ship's anchors, by dragging them with tractors.

The tale I was told was one of these towing tractors became bogged in the soft sand, despite having caterpillar tracks.

A second tractor became similarly bogged trying to rescue the first.

Much head-scratching, then someone recalled a local man owned a preserved traction-engine built with a winch driven from the engine itself. They hired the engine and driver, and with the engine standing safely on hard ground, attached the wire-rope to each tractor in turn.

Now, this entailed a very long wire-rope, and if a wire-rope snaps under very high tension it can recoil violently enough to kill anyone it hits. So the traction-engine driver needed protection while everyone else could simply stand well clear.... a sheet of corrugated-iron somehow stood up on the back of the engine. It might have worked.

It all sounds rather alarming, but the Edwardian steam traction-engine with winch succeeded in rescuing the two modern, Diesel-powered crawler-tractors!

only in W-i-s-c-o-n-s-i-n will you find thee wandering tractors! LOL