Spent all day yesterday sorting out all the logistics for our shoot tomorrow morning and I can safely say that even on a tiny island nation such as this there is a muddle of bureaucracy to get through before the necessary permits can be cleared. I was sent on a jolly merry-go-round from the Airport Authority to the Board of Tourism, from there to the Ministry of Tourism and Civil Aviation, from there back to the airport and then onto the the Ministry of Carriacou, before going back to the Tourism Board and finally onto the Prime Minister’s Ministry. What a trek, but in the end we finally got our clearance to fly, hurrah! Now all we need is good weather tomorrow or I might be facing that all over again.
6am start, we met with our pilot, Ron and went over the flight plan. The weather was just perfect, good start; crisp blue skies and no wind. David and Ron did some last-minute rigging on the chopper at the runway and then we were off. We filmed various beauty shots of the island before picking up the GSPCA’s van on their way to an outreach programme. We followed them for a while and when we were happy we’d got that we headed back to the airport to refuel and then straight off for a half hour flight over sea to the neighbouring island, Carriacou; We stopped again to refuel at the tiniest airport I’ve ever been to (one shack and a runway). Here we went through the slightly farcical procedure of going in and then out of customs (the hut) before being allowed to take off again. Quite sweet really.
Ron had a bit of fun swooping down low along the stunning white sandy beaches, to the bemusement of the local fishermen before we picked up Luke’s 4×4 driving along. We did various angles on this and then, running low on fuel, we headed back, this time flying over the interior of Grenada which is quite mountainous. Here we started to get blown around as we hit air pockets and turbulence. And, yes, ok, I barfed. I’m not proud of it but it happens to the best of us. I’d had my head buried in the playback monitor which is playing the feed from the gyro-stabilized camera. So my eyes are seeing a nice stable image of the horizon while my body is being thrown around left, right and sideways as Ron tries to fight the turbulence while attempting various acrobatics to get our crazy shots. BAAARF. Ugh. In case you were wondering, I had a sick bag (which I accidentally left in Ron’s gear when we left, ooops).
Job done. Time for a cold drink by the pool, aaaah, this is the life.
