Who put that canal there?
This one landed just a few km from where I live so I know the area pretty well. I had not watched the progress online. I knew nothing about it until I received an alert email from the SQ6KXY Radiosonde Tracker Database which I had not read until after the radio sonde had landed. I was quite busy that morning so I was not sure if I would have enough time to collect it.
I could see the last know position reported (by my tracker) was quite near to the Basingstoke canal. I guessed it might have landed on the south side of the canal and, as the tow path is on the south side, I decided to park there and walk along the south side. It had rained heavily for the last week so I took my Wellington boots with me as I was sure any fields I had to cross would be very muddy. I parked next to a canal bridge and started to get ready to locate the radio sonde. At least it was not raining, which was lucky because in my rush to leave, I had forget to bring a coat.
I realised my first mistake when I tried to put the boots on. Wellington boots all look much the same and in my haste, I had brought my son's boots and not mine. His are about two sizes smaller than mine. As I was tight for time, I just put them on and started walking along the tow path with my toes curled up. It was a tight fit but walkable, so long as I did not have far to go.
Once I was about 500m along the tow path, I picked up the signal with my mobile tracker. The radio sonde had not crossed the canal and it was in a field on the north side. After walking a couple of hundred metres more, I could see it just 15m away from me. The only problem was there was a canal in the way.
The best option now was to continue as I knew there was a bridge over the canal a few hundred metres further on. I crossed the bridge, then walked a few hundred metres back through a muddy field to recover the radio sonde. After walking through very thick mud in the wrong size boots, my toes were beginning to hurt and I still had a long way to walk back.
One unusal attribute of this recovery was the amount of balloon that I recovered. In most cases, there is very little balloon left to recover. I was talking with a meteorologist recently and he said when the ballon busts, it is usually so cold, it fragments and scatters across a large area, so there is usually very little to find at the radio sonde land site.
Having walked back across the muddy field to the bridge over the canal, I was now at the furthest point from my car. It was at this point, it started to rain and I had no coat. As I headed back along the tow path on the south side of the canal it started to rain heavier and heavier. The only people I saw on my way back to the car were people walking their dogs along the tow path. They looked as miserable as I did in the rain, except they were all wearing heavy waterproof coats and probabaly wondering why I wasn't. At one point, I did consider using the radio sonde parachute as a temporary waterproof hat but I decided that wearing a red plastic parachute on my head would make me look more unusual than I already did.
Finally, soaking wet and with aching toes, I arrived back at my car. It was still raining heavily but at least I had a roof over my head. Then I encounted my next problem. The boots were so tight, I could hardly get them off. The rain did not help as it had made everything very slippy. After some consierable effort, I managed to remove the boot on my left foot but no matter what I tried, the right boot refused to move. I even tried jamming the heel of the boot between the car door and the door frame, bracing myself against the passenger seat and pulling back as hard as I could but it was stuck. The only positive in this whole situation was that it was raining so hard, there were no witnesses to my extaordinary performance. On a drier day, I am sure I would have attracted a crown of onlookers and found myself the subject of a viral Tiktok video.
In the end, I gave up and drove home with a normal shoe on one foot and a Wellington boot on the other. Once home, I had a chance to dry the boot and after a few more attempts with a door frame (but this time the door to my house), the right boot finally came free.
Overall, this was not my most enjoyable radio sonde recovery but at least I removed it from a field so the environment is a little tidier than it would have been if I had not recovered it. After all, removing radio sondes from the environment is just as important to me as the fun of the chase.
The track of this radio sonde is recoded on radiosondy.info.