New Dock for Palangkaraya Base

For years our base in Palangkaraya hasn't had any type of decent maintanence facility for their float planes. This past weekend I was able to help build a new floating concrete dock. There is only a few weeks every year where the river is low enough to build such a heavy dock on dry land in a position to float again when the river rises. Next year we will be building another dock to connect to this one, but it will be three times the size.

Off-Roading

The other day I went off road with a few of the other MAFers. These are two Land Rovers that a couple of our guys own. I drove the silver one for part of the trip.

Here is a picture of one of the hills right before we climbed up it. The guy on the dirt bike is Alan Discoe, also a MAFer.

This picture doesn't do justice to how steep this hill really is.

The Incredible Shrinking Fuel Supply...Again!

Above is all of our EMPTY barrels

These are the only FULL barrels of Avgas that we have left in Tarakan.

A few months ago, we at MAF realized that we were starting to get low on fuel. We ordered several hundred barrels of fuel so that we could continue our flight operations here. Our fuel is very hard to get in Indonesia, and they don't make it very often. We actually end up paying over $8 per gallon for this fuel. Well, the refinery made the fuel, but they didn't have enough of it to fill all of the orders. So, our order ended up getting cancelled. This sent us into a tizzy trying to figure out how to get more fuel and how to make the little bit of fuel that we have be able to last until we can get more.

On Friday, we had some good news. The refinery decided to make another production run of the fuel that we desperately need. So, when I took this picture, and made plans to write this blog, we had no real idea of when we might get fuel again. Now, we are optimistically hoping that in mid-November, we will have another shipment come it. Until then, we should have enough fuel to last if we fly half the amount of flights that we usually fly. Praise the Lord.