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4th Steve Maddison 3 Peaks Challenge

This year, Team J33P made up of four Jeeps (Us, Cuffy & Sam, Will Brighton & Dan and Simon Redmond & Daz and a Landrover (Stefan Pracht & Uwe).

The four Jeeps and their tow vehicles met up on various parts of the M4 on Thursday and headed off to Pembroke. This year’s crossing was far calmer than last year although Will had some bad beer (?) on the way over and felt a little rough. A night at O’Leary’s Farm and our first alcohol of the trip, then onto Mallow to meet up with Stefan at the Hibernian Hotel on Friday lunchtime. The specially prepared team shirts were handed out so we were ready to go for it.

Last years’ vehicle park has now become a housing estate so this prompted a wonderful trip around the narrow roads of Mallow with four trailers, a chat with a Garda man with a speed camera, a few phone calls to Jimmy Dean later and all the trailers were parked and we were back off to the hotel to try out the Guinness. Four hours later and a few pints later we were asked to move our vehicles to the local school. Luckily a sober minority were on hand to do the honours and we were soon parked up alongside all manner of exotic vehicles from the hard core challenge scene of the UK and a team from Belgium.

The first year we did this event there had been several months of dry weather, clear skies and frostbite was the problem. Last year there had been months of rain but the event stayed dry. This year months of rain were followed by record downpours on the event itself. It was WET, a hotel employee was heard to say that if this was the Sahara, it would have its own lake by now.

Saturday started with a drive into the Ballyhoura Mountains followed by a wait for the other teams to arrive. Once all assembled Tony McMullan set off to take us to our designated stages. Unfortunately it all looks different in low cloud, mist and heavy rain and it took Tony some time before he stopped at our stage and announced that this was the nastiest stage of the whole mountain. His young helper took great delight in telling us about the sheer drops into various ditches. It all started with a flooded lane to drive through which took on the appearance of a swamp. This was easily achieved, much to the disgust of Tony’s young helper, but then we were into the stage proper and suddenly got a lot more interesting. The mud quickly became thicker, the ditches got a lot deeper, the winches got hotter but with determination and team work we reached our first punch. By this stage Simon had snapped the plasma rope in his rear winch and broken the casing on his front winch. I was at the bottom of a ditch with a front winch that did not want to move and with only another 30 punches to go on this site – what fun !

The second punch was very tricky with Stefan needing to use his rear winch onto the roll cage via a snatch block to stop rolling whilst using his front winch to pull the front end around. Cuffy used a similar technique, unfortunately when Will tried it the result was just a little different. On reaching the bottom of the ditch there was a loud bang and the front wheels no longer obeyed the steering wheel. The bar going from the Pitman arm was now in two pieces and Will was buried in a ditch, only hanging on by his rear winch. The rest of the day was spent recovering Will meaning that the whole team had to work together to get the Jeep back to the start. Simon and Daz were hard at work swapping over Simon’s front and rear winches and getting our fan to occasionally work as our engine was overheating due to a clogged radiator. With Will well on the way to recovery, Simon and Angela finished the stage crossing a ditch which gave great air over the rear wheel.

All that was left was to get Will backwards across the flooded lane. This was achieved by a combination of his own power for the first half and winch recovery firstly from Cuffy and Stefan and followed up by winching from Angela for the last bit allowing Stefan and Cuffy to collect a few much needed punches. Dan went off to the local garage and welded/sleeved the broken arm and by 6 o’clock we were all in the bar preparing for Saturday night’s food and drink.

Sunday started off sunny although the road to Nagles was interesting due to all the flooding. Will and Stefan set up a cracking pace and we quickly doubled the number of punches from Saturday. Having got the two punches in the first stage, Cuffy discovered that he had ripped one of his front brake hoses off. After a few funny moments Cuffy got out of the stage and then we settled down to replacing the brake hose.  Unfortuntately Cuffy found that he had picked up the wrong set of brake hoses, instead of bringing Chevvy ones he was carrying his old TJ ones.  Fortunately Daz, with the aid of a file and the portable workshop in Simon’s Jeep was able to get a TJ pipe to fit. So after a short break we set off to catch Stefan and Will. We briefly caught up with them finding Stefan having an involuntary tyre change in a particularly interesting position. This is fast becoming a J33P tradition. But they were soon off again running as a pair as we had become separated by that point.

The rest of the day was spent collecting lots of punches with some very interesting moments, use of every piece of kit taken and some really great stages to drive. During the day, the rain set in again make it even wetter, if that was possible.

The most interesting was the penultimate stage when Cuffy recommended a bit of commitment to get over a bank and side slope. Angela duly complied and we move on to a nearby punch. At this point a message came over the CB requesting assistance as Simon’s Jeep had rolled over. Thankfully Simon and Daz were no worse for wear after their unplanned roll but on closer inspection, we noticed a large rock the size of a dinner plate wedged into one of the front springs. Our Jeep was manoeuvred into position to recover Simon to the right way up and the rock was duly removed. We were soon on the move again completing the stage and collecting 2 more punches on that stage and a further 2 on the final one of the day.

Due to the amount of flood water around, the vehicles had a free wash as we drove back to the hotel. It was a slightly different case for the people who were all in need of a good shower. Trailers were recovered from their storage compound for Cuffy and Sam to load up to drive back to Rosslare ready to catch the Monday morning ferry home. Everyone else stayed on for the gala dinner on Sunday evening and chance to catch up with others taking part in the event. Monday morning in the car park gave us all chance to see the vehicles in daylight and survey new dents and the like. Given the hard nature of this year’s event, we all came away relatively unscathed as Dan’s repair to Will’s vehicle has made it stronger than the original. Both Cuffy’s and our Jeep donated spare parts to enable Alan Wormald to get home (we hope !) and we all went our separate ways back home.

As ever, a really great event and one that Team J33P will definitely return to next year. This year’s event saw a record entry of 71 vehicles, even with that number taking part, we only once met another team in the stages during the whole weekend. Once again, a really big thank you to all from Munster 4x4 for their efforts in making this event so special.