Silhouette challenge

[RegDep]

Great Pumpkin

[Mechta]

Reg Dep, Your pumpkins must be genetically modified! If I was looking in the garden I would have gone for a marrow or maybe a gherkin...

[RegDep]

I'll take a look in the morning. Now it's raining and dark .

[Lightning Mate]

Would that photograph have been taken near St. Louis by any chance?

Wotever you were on last night mate, I want some!

[Mechta]

Hi Mate,

St. Louis? As in, 'Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the fair'? No 'fraid not. A bit closer to home; well, for me, anyway.

Wotever I was on last night got me in the doghouse. I was supposed to collect Mechta Minor from his before-school ice skating class this morning, and was woken by him phoning from outside the rink saying, 'Dad, where are you?'

[RegDep]

Mechta

In support to my post above, here you are a video which should tell you that I could have been correct. Not me on the video, though .

Veelgi paisunud hiigelkõrvits oli Kuressaares rahvale näha - htuleht

[Lightning Mate]

Is the challenge associated in any way with Mr. Tom Flack?

[RegDep]

Mechta

Is the original picture in colour? Looks like a bunch of civilians in a hole dug in a dune landscape. Time span could be some 90 years, but pic seems to hint to post-WWII.

[Lightning Mate]

Photoshop tells me it's in standard RGB mode, but is a monochrome picture.

For what it's worth, I think the challenge is sheltering in a clay pit in England.

[RegDep]

Just for the sake of discussion, I should claim that Tom's pits were much shallower and that the dunes in the challenge are on the continent.

[Lightning Mate]

Just how do you know that?

[Mechta]

Strewth, is that what the dust cloud from Chernobyl caused when it passed over Scandanavia. I still reckon the original photo looks like a gherkin though.

I've no idea who Tom Flack is. The photo is in a quarry, and it is post WW2.

I'm going out for an hour or so now.

[Lightning Mate]

Tom Flack was a British balloon designer.

[RegDep]

Photo taken in Suffolk or Somerset? (LM, I am hitchhiking)

Edit: And the pumpkin was grown in Baltia, not in Scandinavia. Semantics? Ask any Scandinavian or Balt.

[Mechta]

Re: Scandanavia & Baltia, I always thought that being on the other side of a fairly sizable lump of water, that Finland should be part of something else. What are the chances of getting a decent Balti there though?

RegDep, you are in the right part of the alphabet, but wrong county.

[Lightning Mate]

RegDep,

I think he might mean Surrey.

[Mechta]

LM's on the scent

[RegDep]

Finland might be (as far as I understand) part of yet another piece of semantics, but judged from the place name the pumpkin was grown in Estonia, on an island that is in surrounded by the water you are alluding to. So go figure.

The Balti question was wasted on me. No comprendo.

[Mechta]

I assumed from the language (without checking) that it was Finland, not Estonia.

Baltia > Balti Don't worry, its just the way my brain works...

Back to our vegetable shaped flying machine; it shares its name with a US carrier that was built to use up a tonnage allowance.

[RegDep]

That would make it Lexington or Saratoga which were both converted to carriers after the conference. But.....