Working as a Quad Biking Instructor in Scotland (part 4)
And so it was that I had a whole year of
quad biking in scotland which was incident free, of all of the quad bike treks which I ran there where simply no accidents, the system which I had developed having had the benefit of witnessing where the centre manager had been going wrong when he was running quad biking, was working and I had been running treks for pretty much all of the busy season without incident. Of course this is when we become complacent, yet I still continued to operate the regime of switching off engines and reinforcing the safety talk at the top of the hill before driving down the final part of track to the finish point and I took great care to make sure that customers knew that they would be penalised for any misconduct during the
quad bike trek. Then one fateful day it happened, I had stopped the trek as I normally did at the top of the hill before coming through the final gate. As I always did I stressed the importance of using a slow speed on the descent down the final hill to the storage container where the quad bikes where kept and instructed the customers to use only second gear on the quad bikes for the last section and to slow down before turning in at the container and that they should not overtake or hold back in order to go faster. We set off down the track and arrived safely back at the container but it was only as we parked up the quad bikes that I realised one was missing. As I walked back to the track to look up the hill I saw the last customer on the trek charging down the hill at about forty miles an hour. He hadn't noticed the container and it was only as I walked back onto the track to see where he was that he realised he needed to stop. As he slammed on the brakes he also tried to turn into the entrance to where the storage container was and then the bike flipped throwing him off and slamming him against a tree, I watched in horror as I saw the bike carwheeling towards where he lay by the tree sure that the quad bike would hit him. Then as though there was some invisible forcefield between the customer and the quad bike it suddenly veered off at a tangent and rolled past him. I looked down at the customer unable to comprehend why he had completely ignored the warnings he had been given, but equally relieved that he was still alive. That was probably one of the last times I went
Quad biking in Scotland.