Cannabis hunting; A Canberra childrens sport.
First published – Feb 14 2007.
As anyone that reads this from Australia will know; weed is decriminalised in Canberra which is my hometown.
Due to this fact there‟s a lot of pot smokers and almost as many backyard pot growers in Canberra.
I know its a bit slack but for us guys growing up there as kids a great way to spend the school holidays was to go searching for dope plants.
Each year we would be sitting around after a game of basketball, cricket or footy and one of us would suddenly go "oh shit lads its harvest time" and we would all realise it was that time of year.
Having grown up around the green herb I was the nose of the operation and we would hit the streets and allies with our noses in the air.
The start of the season was easiest as we would pull out our map of the last year and re-visit some places that would be trying to grow for a second unsuccessful year.
Like I said it was pretty slack but hey you get up to mischief as a youngster.
Usually after a couple of weeks we would have enough smoko to have us in the money for a while on top of the odd smoke.
I have a million funny stories from these missions‟ here‟s a funny one.
It was my first year living out of home and although I managed to make a few dollars I wasn‟t that good at budgeting (I was only 15 or 16) so the money I did get went as quick as I made it partying and supporting my broke mates.
So when this harvest season came around me and another mate "Andrew" who at the time was also supporting himself at age 15 decided we were fairly keen to get into some action.
After a few days of not locating anything we decided to go on a night mission to check out a small time local dealer‟s back yard.
We arrived at roughly midnight and quietly we made our way into the backyard taking care not to set the sensor lights off.
It wasn‟t that big of a yard but in the dark it took us a while to search and turned up nothing.
As we walked home I remembered a girl I knew telling me some guys behind her house grew pot and so as not to waste an evening we checked it out.
After sneaking into my friend‟s backyard we climbed her back fence and searched the yard of the house behind her.
At this stage it was about 1am.
I found one plant but it was only small and the head on it was barely worth taking so after a thorough yard search we thought that was it for the night until I noticed some clear perspex on the roof of a shed.
On closer inspection I discovered two things
1) Looking through a small hole I could see the shed was full of ripe plants ready for harvest.
2) The shed was bolted and welded like a fortress!
After a quick think I worked out a plan we climbed into the neighbour‟s yard which had its fence backing onto the shed and we began to dig.
Unfortunately we weren‟t prepared for digging and the only tool we had was our hands.
After digging for a long while we discovered the shed had chicken wire buried around the perimeter which was attached to the walls inside the shed.
With our pair of scissors and small knife we had brought along we slowly and very quietly cut a hole in the wire and continued digging until past sunrise.
As it came on seven thirty we realised it was now or never for our rip as both the people in the house who owned the shed and the people in the house belonging to the yard we were in were all up and awake.
The hole still wasn‟t that big but I would squeeze in through it and Andrew would push me through by my legs, I would grab two plants, one in each hand and he would pull me back out.
About 2/3rd's of the way through removing the plants I was just grabbing another pair when I heard a voice in the yard the shed was located in and it sounded as though it was right next to me!
I thought oh its cool he won‟t notice me in here until I heard him call out "honey, that little plant is gone quick get me the shed keys".
I grabbed two plants and kicked my legs so Andrew would drag me out, as I popped out the other end I could hear the shed door being opened.
Andrew grabbed the bag which was full to the point of bursting and I had the two plants bout 4 foot tall each and we bolted down the street.
It took us over two hours to make what would normally be a 20 min walk to my flat as there was cars screeching around every where looking for us so we constantly had to dive into bushes or run through allies, a couple of times the cars even trailed us for a while until we managed an escape.
Once we got home we harvested our spoils and hung them out to dry.
Im pretty sure we skipped school got stoned and watched Menace to society and crashed out.
A week later we were buying sneakers and cd's, partying and showing our people a good time.
Two weeks after that we were back on the hunt.
Good times.