Road Guard Practice

Posted October 25, 2010 NLMC blog

On Sunday, the future Captain of the Road Guards, (Road Guard Captain), our current Road Captain, held practice for the new line up of Road Guards. The group met at Dunkin Donuts at 10am for coffee then headed up Raymond Hill road, S.A.A. T.Yuchniuk leading, passed through Montville Center and arrived at Camp Oakdale.

On arrival all the bikes parked side by side and R.C. Llorett gave a short intro to the Job speech, explaining what was expected of the group and an intro on how to do it. From this point he started the training. The road at Camp Oakdale is "almost" perfect because it is more narrow than real roads, this makes for tighter turns on behalf of the guards, unfortunately it has a few speed limiting devices.

For those of you who have never been to Camp Oakdale, let me explain their version of a speed control device. You have all seen road bumps, those piles of additional pavement stretched across the road designed to clean out your under-carriage if you go over them too quick. Oakdale does the opposite and it seems a lot more effective, essentially what they have is a reversed speed bump, a paved ditch running across the road, when you hit it at speed the vehicle bottoms out then is launched off the opposite side, as you front end is coming back down to earth the rear end drops in the ditch. These really do work to slow vehicles.
Tom had each guard ride down the road in second gear, turn hard left drop to first, pull a 180 and head back up the road. Then he lined up pairs and had them do the maneuver, both head down the road, when they reach the turn point the rear bike turns in, the lead bike, watching in his mirror sees this and makes his turn, so both bikes perform a hammerhead then pull up to block the road, the lead bike moving to the line. After this is was time for four bike to go out two right, two left. Out, turn, block, cover, re-cover, return.
Once practice was over the group met the Prez and the Secretary at Chilies for lunch before heading home.

Actually a fun day, everyone enjoyed themselves. We had Montville Police arrive (probably because someone called about motorcycles), they watched for a while then headed out.

I can report that the Hollywood bit where they park all the motorcycles in a row and one falls they all domino is not true. What happens is, the bike on the end falls over, there is a crunching sound as it impacts the next bike, everyone turns to look, end of story.



End of story

Klay