The GTS Chronicles - Getting Two/True Sportscars - Lead-up - 2020-2023

September 2022 - Intensity Increase

As September arrived, we had started again (hm, starting to notice our enthusiasm seemed to come in like waves off the ocean) to think about how we could take The GTS Chronicles media initiative to a higher level. We started commissioning a set of decals, stickers, cups, shirts, flags, pens, and business cards (Dave is definitely a decal aficionado, and got us thinking about those).

We decided that the GTS Chronicles Instagram feed, now populated and up to date with a set of postings to the current time, could stand to have an upgrade in the quality of posts - so we started planning to create more polished content, and we identified the first of those as a short segment showing us carefully washing our existing cars ... all the while dreaming about how in the future these would be our two Red 718 GTS 4.0s...

On the data collection side, Luke continued to gather order and allocation information from our requests in the forums, and continued to update our order and allocation spreadsheet. There were sporadic handouts, but no surge in allocations - just a very low background level of activity.

Luke's Thoughts

[on the end of another summer...]

We keep the faith (don't have an alternative really, do we???) and continue The GTS Chronicles efforts. A little more video work this weekend to create some 'detailing porn' for the Instagram. Gotta keep the fire burning. I remain optimistic, if somewhat subdued. But grant me an allocation for anytime (Xmas???) and I'll light up like a Christmas tree!

(to read more of Luke's thoughts from this moment, check out his blog post)

We made good on our efforts to create that first "uplevel" Instagram post; Luke and I recorded a dreamy video of him washing his red Honda S2000. We deliberately kept all of the shots very close-in, making it ambiguous as to what car exactly was being washed. And the red of the S2000 is a pretty good match for Guards Red, so ... you get the idea. In our short 1-minute clip, you only get the idea that a guy is washing his ambiguous red convertible sports car and dreaming about it being a red Boxster GTS 4.0s. Have a look at the clip yourself below: We think it's pretty good!

On Instagram: Carwash Post, or watch directly on this page:

The GTS Chronicles Instagram Post 057 - "The Car Wash"

Mid-September 2022 - Matt's Reincarnation

We notice in an Instagram post that YouTube Porsche online influencer Matt Farah (of The Smoking Tire fame) has gotten his frozenberry pink 718 Spyder rebuilt after the original was lost in that Felicity Ace fire and sinking from the spring. The car is sitting at Deman Motorsport in Nyack, NY (yes, that same Deman Motorsport I visited just a month before in August), waiting to get a 4.5L engine job and the short gears. Will be an awesome thing when done. And also gets us thinking, hey... we never reached out to Matt about the GTS Chronicles. Why don't we do just that?

The Smoking Tire's Matt Farah has his Frozenberry Pink Metallic 718 Spyder at Deman Motorsports, ready for engine and re-gearing work.

To our delight, Matt replied nearly instantly to our email reach-out. He didn't really have too much advice to offer about help with The GTS Chronicles, but he did think it was a fun idea and he had good info on the experience with getting the gears done at Deman Motorsports, which was good info to have in one's back pocket. So nice of him to take the time to respond!

The fact that Matt had received his Spyder was, to us, also a good sign: to us it meant that the re-production of the pool of cars that sank with the Felicity Ace was underway, or maybe even complete. We saw that as one less obstacle in the way to resuming production - and therefore allocations - towards "our" batch of cars.

October 2022 - Staying Active

We continued to be sufficiently motivated to get content out onto the GTS Chronicles Instagram feed. To show we were pumped. To show that we were not deterred by the slow, slow, flow of allocations. And show that we could produce content, frankly, which maybe might entice that one important Porsche individual who had the right position, point of view, state of mind, and would be intrigued by seeing us do our goofy stuff. But what content could one show about two red GTS 4.0 Porsches, when one did not have said Porsches? (or even the promise of said Porsches, really).

We decided ... just ... stuff. We came up with the idea of doing vigorous outdoor activities while sporting all of the recent GTS Chronicles branded paraphernalia we had commissioned. We spent a good six weeks doing and recording a bunch of outdoor activities: kayaking, cycling, hiking, sailing, etc.

Luke's Thoughts

[on staying active... and hopeful...]

Another birthday comes and goes. The original Porsche plan was perhaps having one by the time I turned 53. Three years after the 'bucket list' of driving on the Nordschleife in the year I hit 50. Seemed reasonable at the time. Now, here's just hoping for a special 55th year.

We took the cars down to the Adirondacks for some curves and some hiking. Felt great to be out in the fresh air and the spectacular fall colours. The weather cooperated and I found my spirits high as we flew our flags from the south summit of Catamount.

October 2, 2022 - The Incident

One particularly disastrous incident befell us during the filming for "Being Active". It occurred while we were doing one of the shoots for the sailing activity, out on a wide section of the Ottawa River just outside of town. Now, I've always found flying a drone can be a disorienting experience if you aren't completely focused. And I was focused, don't get me wrong ... but the extra factor of a moving water object (either if you are filming it or filming from it) is especially tricky. And that ... proved to be my undoing.

As I was attempting to navigate around from the shady side to the sunlit side of Luke's tidy Laser 2 (with friend Laurent standing in as my stunt double on the boat), I cut over with a side-pan maneuver a little too early. And my drone does not have lateral obstacle avoidance sensors. And before I knew what was going on, a flash of white sail filled my viewscreen, then sudden random images of water and sky and ... then dark brown ... black. I didn't say a word. I put the controller down and started to process the loss of a $1200 piece of gear. The following video fragment captures the disastrous moment:

A short video clip documenting the moment where I crashed the drone into Luke's sailboat and then down into the water of the river.

We didn't have phone or radio contact out onto the sailboat (for fear of getting the electronics wet), so I had we no communication between shore (where I had been piloting the drone) and the boat. I simply packed up my stuff and headed back to the marina where I knew Luke would now be headed with the sailboat.

I was in no particular mood to continue with anything more to do with the shoot, or to chat. I tersely said a few words after Luke and Lo landed the Laser and then I head off home. To add insult to injury, I hadn't gotten the exact video sequence that I had wanted from the sailing (and even if I had, the SD card with the video on it was now sitting at the bottom of a 2-mile wide river).

Surprisingly, after stewing for only about 24 hours, my mood started to shift to something more productive: How were we going to complete filming for "Being Active", including all of the aerial shots I wanted to get? Firstly, we decided not to slow down, but rather that we would continue with one of the activities not requiring aerial footage: a mountain hike, and so that very weekend, Luke and I went to the nearby Adirondack Mountains of New York state and climbing a short peak called "Catamount Mountain". It was perfect: quick approach, lots of scenic crags and viewpoints from which to take swag-adorned shots of us, and a few leaf-strewn twisty roads nearby to capture a few car shots of Luke's S2000, which had become a kind of present stand-in for future 718 GTS 4.0s. You can see many cut scenes from this mountain outing in the "Being Active" video (located a couple of pages ahead in this report).

Regarding the aerial footage and the drone, I split my efforts: in the immediate term, I needed a drone, and so I managed to find an outfit in the states that sold replacement units of just the body of my drone - no battery, no props, no controller, no box, no accessories - just the basic drone body. It was expensive - $750 US (so basically $1000 canadian) but it was really the shortest path to getting a camera in the air again.

The second prong of my drone efforts involved salvage. As in, I had a strong urge to try and actually locate and retrieve the drowned drone. I really didn't like the idea of my electronic waste polluting the bottom of the Ottawa River, and I also had the notion that I'd be able to salvage some useful bits from the drone if I could get my hands on it.

Upon reviewing the last-known GPS location of the drone, we realized it was in relatively shallow water - somewhere roughly at 7-10 feet of depth, and about half a mile out from shore. That seemed ... within the realm of "gettability".

Luke and I tried dreaming up various methods of how to find and get at the drone. We thought about long tubes with plexiglass on the end, that we would use as a kind of scope, peering down from the boat. Or maybe strapping a waterproof gopro to the end of a long stick and then remote viewing the bottom (but wi-fi wasn't going to work through water). Using a long butterfly net to feel and snag the drone. And various other half-baked ideas. In passing, I mentioned my troubles to my outdoor friend Roland, and he immediately seemed keen to don his drysuit and goggles and snorkle and search on my behalf. Roland has always been a keen "rescuer" type guy. Even for drones, it seemed. So that would be it: Roland would do some snorkeling passes in the area of the drone d[r]owning.

October 7, 2022 - Salvage Attempt #1

On October the 7th, a few days after "The Incident", on a mostly overcast day, I met Roland at Shirleys Bay Park near Ottawa and I started inflating his portable raft, while he started getting his bright orange drysuit on. We started paddling northward from the beach, making a direct beeline for the waypoint I had pre-placed into my handheld GPS unit, which was about 500 metres (500 yards) from shore.

The water around us looked pretty dark and opaque, especially given the not-that-bright skies. Still, Roland was keen. He soon dropped off the edge of the raft and made the first of several 20 to 30 second passes under the water. Each time he came up with a shake of his head. To make things more difficult, we didn't have a great anchor and it was difficult for me to keep the boat precisely on top of the last-known-location GPS point (which Roland was using as his reference).

During one of his breaks, Roland reported that the water seemed to be around 8 feet in depth in this area, and that visibility was maybe 4, 5 feet - tops. That meant he wasn't able to see the riverbed from right near the surface. He needed to dive slightly and then swim laterally. The bottom was a featureless brown surface - devoid of vegetation - with the occasional small boulder.

After about half an hour to forty minutes of this, we decided to give up. Roland wasn't really able to cover enough ground with each dive and he didn't feel particularly confident at this point. Back in the raft, we started paddling back to shore, empty-handed.

We chatted as we rowed back to shore. The Ottawa River is more of wide lake than river here, and there were huge expanses of water in all directions. The possibility of finding a small gray 595-gram hunk of plastic started to seem rather remote. Roland thought there was still a possibility of salvage, if only one could stay down longer and maneuver better. He recalled that he knew a good friend from the local alpine club - Steve Montgomery (in fact, I knew Steve as well from being a member of the same club myself). Roland felt that this might be something right up Steve's alley - that he'd be keen to do something targeted like this. And so, that evening, Roland sent off a message to Steve:

Hey Steven, how're things? Been diving lots this summer? Got a bit of a mission for you if you're interested, using those diving skills of yours.

Turns out our mutual friend Andrew Lavigne lost a drone in the Ottawa River after an unfortunate collision with a sailboat. He's hoping to salvage it for parts/declutter the river. We tried finding it yesterday by snorkeling, but it's a bit too deep to get much bottom time without SCUBA.

The GPS coordinates are pretty precise, so the actual search area is probably a radius of 30-45' around the fix. The water is 8-10' deep, about 10-12C. Visibility around 5' in tea coloured water. Bottom is hard clay with the occasional rock. It's about 750m straight out from Shirley's Bay boat launch.

I would have suited up myself but my sinuses are green right now (kids in school, what can I say--apparently the next two years will be like this), never mind my lungs still have the occasional post covid fluid in them ... soooooo, think this is something you could help with?

Thanks Roland

Steve, fortunately, was indeed interested in helping with "the mission", I guess both as a favor and as a fun challenge. Which was fortunate for us, since it was becoming clear that our various simplistic ideas of recovery were super long shots. And who knew - maybe this SCUBA idea was also a long shot.

October 10, 2022 - Salvage Attempt #2

So, a couple of days after our initial attempt with Roland, I met again - this time with Luke - at the Shirleys Bay Park beach. Luke had managed to borrow his sailing club's metal dinghy. That was going to be our base of operations for today's outing.

The day was much sunnier than on our first attempt. This probably meant a bit more light and a bit more visibility underwater, which again was in our favor. The combination of better conditions and a much better search setup had me feeling cautiously optimistic. I think I voiced our probability of finding the drone at 50-50. I can't remember what Luke's estimate was.

Luke and I pushed the metal Dinghy into the shallow water and pushed off, slowly rowing to the North. It was only about 500 metres (yards) out to the target location, but we weren't very good rowers and it still took us a few tens of minutes.

Steve - our experienced SCUBA friend - wasn't in the dinghy with us. He instead decided to enter the water at the beach and use his fancy James Bond-ish prop thing to cruise along in the water beside us.

We got to the target spot and put down an anchor. With two people in the boat today, we were able to properly monitor the GPS and work the oars and keep ourselves pretty much within a metre or two of the target co-ordinates. We ran a thin red rope between the rope and Steve and he started a back and forth pattern underneath us.

Unfortunately, after a few minutes, Steve came up and reported that the red guide rope has tangled in the blades of his underwater scooter's prop. We brought it aboard and try to unjam things, but the rope has been pulled too deeply into the prop shaft mechanism for us to get it out without disassembly. Unfortunately, that meant Steve would have to continue his search without being pulled by the scooter. He'll have to do it old-school.

Steve continued his pattern underneath us. Luke and I chattered about allocation stuff we've read about on the forums (I mean, what else do we talk about these days right?). We see a few bubbles rise up here and there. We occasionally saw the top of his tanks. And then, lo and behold, a hand rose from the water, and in the grip of that hand - a spidery gray shape! For a moment, I could scarcely believe it! That was ... indeed ... my drone!

Whoa. We actually did it. We recovered a drone from a wide, featureless expanse of murky water - a drone that had been sitting, half-stuck in riverbed muck, for eight days.

Steve gently brought the drone over to the side of the dinghy. It seemed in pretty good shape. The impact with the sail / sailboat / water did not seem to have broken anything obvious. Maybe a little crack on one or two prop blades - that was about it. I started to think ... maybe there's more I can salvage from the drone than I originally thought? Given the generally good shape of the drone, I wanted to preserve its state as best as I could. I filled a large zip-loc bag with river water and I placed the drone in the bag in the water, completely immersing it. I wanted to keep it in its "crashed" environment right up until I started whatever extraction / refurbishment I was going to do on it. I certainly didn't want any drying to start before I was ready for that.

We chatted excitedly as we rowed back towards the beach. The whole operation had gone fairly quickly - maybe just over an hour. I was pleased with my e-waste cleanup of the Ottawa River, too. The success had somehow buoyed us, even though it really had nothing to do with the likelihood of us getting allocations, or really, anything to do with cars. Maybe simply because we took it as a good omen? No matter. Today had been a good day!

Luke's Thoughts

[on "The Incident"...]

Horrors. My heart sank when the drone went down, as those things aren't cheap, and Andrew was waaaaaay over on the bank, powerless to do anything other than mull over in his mind what had happened. Ugh. He'd only recently bought it, primarily for this project and now it was gone. I felt terrible.

Would you believe it, a week later, with the help of a diver friend, we recovered it in about 10 feet of murky water. If there's anything like fate, or good omens or anything like that happening, then one could certainly take it as a sign that things are going to turn in our favour now - the river is 3 miles wide, 10-30 feet deep, with a current - I mean, truly, what were the odds?

I'll take it as a positive portent for the fall/winter - heck, I'll take anything right now!

(to read more of Luke's thoughts from this moment, check out his blog post)

Back on shore, we returned the dinghy and then Luke headed off back to work. I stayed around and helped Steve with his stuff, and then I took him out to lunch - it was the least I could do to compensate him for his time and gear and expertise. We chatted about old times at the ACC Ottawa (Alpine Club of Canada), and various other outdoorsy things.

As soon as I got home from the recovery operations, I filled a cooler with about 6-8 inches of pure distilled water, then took the drone out of its river water bag and completely immersed the drone in the distilled water. I wasn't yet entirely sure what I was going to do with the drone, but felt that - in the spirit of artifact restoration - the best option for the moment was to keep it in its found environment (water). And the fact that the water was distilled might have a further benefit of starting a bit of gentle cleaning on interior components that might have accumulated a bit of sediment or salts from the river's water.

The story of the drowned drone has a few other chapters left in it, and we'll get to that later on. For now, let's return back to the other events of autumn 2022, which was turning out to be fairly busy.