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Hello,
Conspiracy theories are the bestest fun ever, especially as they can never be proven or disproven. They do open the door to an outpouring of nonsense such as when some f-ckwit was suggesting that Caroline may be bank rolled by Nigel Farage.
But in the saga of the Valcom mast there is nothing better than actually having been there.
Thousands of words ' could ' be written about the 300ft mast which was a vast engineering folly. The 500+ tons of concrete poured in to the fish hold to a depth of a yard to counterbalance it is still causing problems in 2024/5, putting Revenge so deep in the water that she cannot get in to dry docks where I would like to take her. It has to be remembered that every action has a reaction.
After the big mast came down, O'Rahilly was incandescent with rage that ' those guys on the ship did not tighten the mast stays ',
But once he was convinced that the mast really had fallen down he started fantasising that the Spanish yard would make a new one to the original spec and that this would be flown out to the ship under a helicopter.
Then he considered that we might buy two enormous tree trunks placed at the bow and stern.
Then he thought that someone other than himself might buy a tower crane only without the crane and that this would have lift/hoist inside so that Peter Chicago could go aloft for maintenance.
Finally he found a small mast that would enable some sort of signal to happen as an interim measure. But even here he could not just buy it but instead pulled me in to some trickery which in legal terms was ' obtaining goods by deception ' but was outsmarted sending him again in to a rage.
Then he/we were out of options.
Thus he was susceptible to any suggestion and soon called me delightedly to say ' They are saying ( he never did say who 'they' were ) that we are stuck in the stone age with steel towers and copper wire. But they've told me about a new mast that is self supporting, needs no maintenance and handles 50KW '.
There was no chance of making him proceed in logical steps. First he would blag this miracle Valcom mast and when it could be seen operating as promised he would blag a second one. Then he would import another RCA 50K Ampliphase from America as he knew where one was available. So his mantra of ' hey baby, 50K on 558 ' would then become ' hey baby 2 x 50K '.
When ( Chicago I suspect ) told him that the 6cyl M.A.N's could not make enough electricity he had World Mission Radio ( I think ) provide a huge V12 gen set.
The first mast arrived and was not free standing at all. It flexed alamrmingly and had to be taken down.At this point I think ( but do not know ) that it suffered internal damage.
My pal Mick Dundee and DJ Paul Shelton went out to repair the cracks in the glass fibre and rig it with kevlar guy ropes.
Chicago tried it at 15KW and the mast sent a firework display in to the night sky. Various fixes were tried after that and the mast broke in two and fell in to the sea.
In the Valcom list of products that I saw a couple of years back, the self same mast is on offer to handle 5KW. I don't know if it would have functioned at 5K or less or if Chicago knew its limitations and overloaded it to prove a point.
So the Valcom mast is on the sea bed next to the 300ft mast. Revenge is loaded down with 500 tons of concrete and the V12 M.A.N sits in the middle of the generator room having done nothing useful for 36 years.
So I think that we forget the conspiracy suggestions and ' dark forces at work '. O'Rahilly was always the shadowy man in the background so that no disaster or dishonesty could ever be traced back to his door. But by doing everything at arms length and through third parties caused most of his grand plans to turn to shit.

PM.