This week has ended on a sad note. Tyner was told yesterday that he would have to go home and heal up. He should be out of his brace in 6 weeks and then once he is cleared by his doctor he will have to be cleared by an RCMP doctor. Then they will bring him back. Unfortunately for Tyner he has to do the 8 weeks all over again with a new troop. If he had made it to the half way point then they would have put him in a troop who was half way through, but we haven�t got there yet so Tyner has to start from scratch. They figure that he will be back in 2-3 months. The Troop is pretty shook up about losing Tyner. He is a good guy and even though we have only known him for 8 weeks, its been 8 weeks of 24/7. You get to know people a lot faster than you would outside of the Depot bubble. Good luck Tyner we will miss you.
The first part of the week was fun. We had intro to strikes in PDT (police defence tactics) the other day. That was fun as we got to punch each other in the head. We mainly got use to the equipment padding head gear and stuff. We got to attack the heavy bag full out for a minute. My shoulders are still a bit soar from that. We would stand in a line of four with our boxing gear on and when the instructor blew his whistle we had to attack the bag full on with punches and kicks until the whistle went again. Then we got back in line and did it again. And we couldn�t count it as a cardio for the week.
We spent ALL DAY Thursday on the advanced driving track. What a blast. The Cpls told us to drive the cars "like you stole it not like you own it". "We want you to test your limits and that of the cars today." Well then, give me the keys. :-) The course is full of hairpin turns, straightaways and more turns. Just to make it more interesting they fill the road with cones which you have to weave in and out of. At the end of it all they have a bunch of tightly packed cones that you have to maneuver your car through. Throughout the day they did stuff to us like chase us with police cars riding our bumper with the lights and sirens going and laying on the horn. As we rounded a corner the Cpls would drive quickly into our path with their cars and we had to make eye contact ( not hit them) and blow the siren or horn before they would move. As we were driving around the advanced track the Cpls would call us on the radio and ask us questions. "What streets in Regina do the busses run on?' "Give me the light phase sequence and what each phase means?" I was one of the first guys to go out so not really knowing the track I punched it. With a Cpl sitting beside me I rounded a corner after a straightaway where I had reached about 80kph. I didn't realize that the corner was a 90 degree hairpin turn. OOOPS too fast. I skidded off the road and into a big pile of snow. For the rest of the day the members of the troop called that corner 'Haneys snowbank'. "oops I almost lost it at Haney�s snowbank" " Haney�s snow bank was calling me" " Hay at least I didn't put the car into a snowbank"etc etc. So I totally had to redeem myself. The final runs of the day we had to drive the track twice without leaving the road (Which meant even crossing the yellow painted lines on the side wasn't allowed) and we were only allowed to strike 2 cones. If you did you lost your chance at a superior. We had three tries to do this and it had to be done in under 3:30 seconds for a pass. On the straightaways you had to punch it and push the car as hard as it would go to have enough time to do the "serpentine of cones" at the end. I passed the first two runs without hitting a single cone. And believe me that was not an easy thing to do. In fact that was the first time that I had done it twice all day without hitting cones. The second part of the advanced track was obstacle avoidance. That was done Friday morning. The weather was not as nice as it was on Thursday and we had a little snow over night. In obstacle avoidance we had to drive a straightaway and take the car up to 70 kph. Half way down the track there were a bunch of cones under a sideways street light. To the left and right of the cones in the middle there was a doorway of cones. As you zipped down the road you had to watch you speed and watch the light. As soon as you got up to speed you had to take your foot off the gas and then your car broke a light beam. That beam triggered the street light which randomly lit up the left or right light. You then had to manoeuver the car through the cones on the left or right and then back through a row of cones in the centre. We practiced all morning and when it came time to test the heat from the cars had melted the skiff of snow turning it into one big ice rink. The instructors lowered the speed to 65kph but it was really hard to keep the car from doing a donut after your second hard turn. Weeeeeeee. The test was put off for better weather on a Saturday in the next week or so.
We all have been given study guides for our �blues�. Right now we are wearing dark blue pants. Some guys refer to them as McDonald�s pants. We have to earn the pants with the yellow stripe on them. We do that in Drill. The drill Cpl will have us at attention and quiz us on the RCMP - who holds what rank, the history, all the ranks and what the rank is represented by. We have to know about Canada, the Canadian coat of arms and everything on it. We have been practising but I don�t think we challenge for our blues for a couple more weeks.
That�s about all for this week. I have a file to go and work on, I have a workout to get in, and a patrol drive of downtown. We are taking Tyner out for dinner tonight as he is leaving on Monday.
This week coming up we get our intro to shotguns. Ooo can't wait to see the bruises from 2 hours of shooting shotguns. Finally, if the weather stays good we will be able to do the Coopers run. That was week 8 here comes 9. |
