Miscellaneous pictures

In no particular order, here are some more pictures, from Seja, one of the first aid volunteers who also helped out with land crewing & paddling for the dragon boat.

The first photo is a typical checkpoint after Day 1 - no beach.

These pictures give a much better idea of the harshness of the light, and thence the heat. The outrigger here is the boat I think we'll do it in next time; a LOT easier to paddle & a lot lighter. Dragonboats are really ceremonial; OC's evolved to sail across oceans.

After it's over, time to go home. That's 350 kilo's worth of boat we've just put onto that trailer, in Swan Hill. The look you can't see on everyone's face is relief.

Being an ex Red Cross event, one of the traditions is Red day, on race day 4. I'm sitting on the boat to keep it attached to the shore as it gets loaded up from the other end. This is at maybe the 2nd checkpoint of the day? The crowd behind are the holiday makers waiting to get their river back.

Race rules are to have lifejackets on board for all crew - after the 1st day people decided it was better to drown perhaps than suffocate certainly, so they now live piled up in the front.

The flowers are plastic. I'm shocked we didn't win the prize for best decorated boat; had there been one, we were a shoe-in.

Looking peaceful - from the finish line back up the river. Towards 4 PM, Swan Hill comes all over pastoral. Mind you, it's about 40 degrees in that picture.

Just coming out of a checkpoint on Day 1 - people still wearing lifejackets at this stage! Note the sandy banks. Note also the glare off the water - it's not just light, it's heat too.

Day Six (race day 5)

Small drama this AM, but it happened before most of us were up. One of the roadcrew - and credit to him for being up before 4 - had bought a new gas bottle the previous day & was trying it out when he thought he heard a leak. He lit a match to check, and yes, there was indeed a leak. And a fireball. Fortunately we didn't set fire to the campsite, which, like most of the country down that way, was pretty dry.

This is Martin & Michael's toughest day; they will drive more than 200 km while I only have to follow the boat 80km down the river. That 80 km on the river will only be about 40 km for me (longish actually, usually I get to drive about 1/4 of the river length, but between Murrabit & Swan Hill the roads are organised on a giant grid, oblique to the river, so I have to zigzag my way up to Swan Hill)

The atmosphere at the start on the final day is substantially more relaxed; it's like this at the big national bridge championships, too. Anxieties, except of a couple of contenders, are largely put aside now. If you've got through four days the fifth doesn't seem so daunting.

The Lions Club is here to provide breakfast, great since we've been up since 4 to fit in the drive from Cohuna. Well, great for me. The rest of the team & road crew has been diverted to a launching ramp about a kilometer away - more last minute improvisation by the organising committee that, over the course of the event, has been falling in my estimation. Once again, next year we'll know.

Anyway, how exactly the last day atmosphere translates into the marshal wearing bishop's attire, I'm not really sure. (Next year I'll ask somebody) The morning is full of monsignors, blessings and admonitions. Interesting how the rural converges on the camp.

The boat makes great time again, and finally after 5 days of successfully negotiating river banks, I do in fact fall in. Apart from getting mud all over me, and thence all over the car - not my car - no particular drama. I also have to give a vote of thanks to the Camberwell Grammar team, who helped me with the dragon boat at the last checkpoint. It was looking pretty unmanageable to me, but they held the boat steady just off the bank - lots of roots, so impossible to get it close in - while our crew did their toilet run. It was the last checkpoint of the race and I was beginning to run a bit low on personal gas, so that made the assistance doubly welcome. Odd coincidence that it should be CGS though, since there's no particular reason it couldn't've been Trinity or Yarra Valley, who were also there. I wasn't wearing the old school tie.

These are the symbol of the checkpoint - civilisation intersects with the river. On the first day I realised that the high priority job was to locate the toilets at each checkpoint & decide if it was possible to get from the boat to the toilets and back. Quite often it wasn't; on the 2nd day the toilets didn't arrive at one checkpoint until after all the boats had left. Well, almost all the boats. On day three one of the checkpoints featured a clay cliff that took about 10 minutes to scale, in single file, so not really practicable for a crew of 12. (It's a mystery to me how the Murray is still there given how soft its banks are.) Of course, other toilet strategies are available.

Finally I got to Swan Hill & realised I was pretty stuffed, because I managed to have three run-ins with the organisers in about 5 minutes, over where to pull the dragon boat out. The actual finish in the park doesn't have a boat ramp and no-one seemed to have thought much about it. Fortunately there was one downstream about a kilometer. The crew took it very well - Good news! You've finished the race. Bad news! You have to keep paddling.

Final cutoff - 4:30. Dragonboat arrives - 3:50. Photographs of the finish - priceless, all three of my cameras ran out of battery! Even my backup battery was flat. How annoying is that? There were a couple of interested spectators, so I'll post those pictures when I can.

Really a fantastic effort by the team. Chasing the boat down the river to the final boat ramp through the Swan Hill parklands will remain one of my favourite memories (and makes all the jogging & the torn ligament look worthwhile). Big round of applause for Nicola, one of the canoeists from the other boats I was looking after, who also chased the boat to help with landing the crew - she'd just finished the 400 km herself in a 2-person canoe, so running a particularly heroic effort (she said if it wasn't sitting and didn't involve her arms, then it wasn't actually that difficult).

A couple of crew members are talking about next year...

And New Year's Eve rolls in.

We ended up camping in the camp site next to the Swan Hill Park. The New Year fireworks woke us up at 11 pm - Michael slept through them - and the storm woke us again at 11:55, just in time for the final countdown.

Even more happily, the tent kept the water out.

Did I mention that some are talking about 2010 already? Calling for volunteers...

Day Five (Race day four)

This is technically the shortest leg of the race, but rumours abound that it is "uphill". That is, the water is "dead" or "heavy". Why is it that when you get near water the English language seems to undergo transmogrification? (Port, starboard, sheets(=ropes), etc. etc. (etc. - lazy but convenient)) Anyway, the view of at least one old-timer - you've seen his picture in the RD 3 report) - is that as you approach the weir the current decreases. He helpfully journeys over to our unofficial camp site to cheer us up with this news.

Opposed to this is the coach's non-specific "Rubbish!, they're all idiots", which, combined with the prospect of a home cooked, well, CWA cooked, dinner at the Cohuna bowls club this evening is enough to get the crew out again. A pattern is emerging:

• Pre-dinner - despair
• Post-dinner - fatalism
• Post-breakfast - cautious optimism

Based on this pattern, I'd say ditch the team psychologist for a nutritionist (actually, we have neither). And possibly, drink more coffee.

Turns out to be a fantastic day for the boat. They are ahead of schedule (well, my calculated schedule based on previous days' performance) at every checkpoint, leaving me a little bit flustered. There's a conflicting need to set up all the supplies close to the river for a rapid refuel with the fact that the eskies aren't very effective and are murdering the ice, with very limited opportunities to replace it, so I'm keeping the eskies away from the bank in the shade. Then when the boat appears it's all hands on deck, except mainly, it's just my hands and one of them is occupied hanging on to branches for balance. Still, I'd rather be falling in the river than paddling on top of it, so no complaints from me.

The RD4 checkpoints involve a lot of walking - we're typically parking outside private property & walking the supplies in. Also, the river access means people are standing away from the river rather than on the bank.

You can see the larger & more organised road crews at work here - more on those a bit later.

I managed to get lost coming out of Charlie today; it was inside a national park and I missed the track out - all bush tracks look identical to me, something the organisers probably hadn't figured on. In general the signposting was fantastic, but they clearly assumed that from cattle grid to river bank wasn't a navigational challenge. Still, I wasn't particularly worried because I was following a car which was clearly with the race -

it's not just the canoe strapped on top, because people actually do that kind of thing socially around here, but there's something about the dust inside and outside the windows that tells you this car doesn't really belong around here (local cars are mysteriously clean on the inside, I guess they don't use the A/C) - until the car pulled over to the side to let me pass, then started following me, doubtless on the same premise. So as to get oxygen mixed in with my A/C, I eschew the use of the recycle internal air option, and live - breathing - in the resulting dust cloud.

Since it was barely possible that I was on the right track I kept going, but when I passed the same jogger (no really, not only do people jog in national parks in 40+ degree heat, there are actually quite a few of them. Not everyone camping on the river is a drunken hoon. They have girlfriends.) for the second time, I knew it was time to stop and ask directions. She gave me the pitying smile reserved for city folk in the bush, and confirmed that I would get out if I continued on the path I was going. Two corners later I was lost again, but at least I was out of the forest. And I had found a kind of lost people's checkpoint because there were 5 4WD, all race people, all busy consulting each other. I was about to wander over and add my 2c worth of ignorance to the pool when I saw a forest ranger. More of the pitying smiles, but at least we're not lost anymore.

A huge part of the race is the school teams. MLC, Strahcona, Camberwell Grammar, Trinity & Yarra Valley all have between 4 and 6 teams entered in the relay. These are the super-organised groups standing under the pavilions in the photo above. They have advance crews setting up the exchange points, and they look like they have either scouted the river or keep the notes from last year. They have rope ladders for the steep banks. Many of them are staying in local hotels rather than the camping grounds, which given how full everywhere is at this time of year suggests serious planning.

In some cases they have staging posts up river (or is it down river?) of the checkpoints so they can radio back team positions to the exchange points. The exchanges are pretty polished too; each school has a banner that marks the exchange point to the incoming paddlers; a crew in the water catches the boat, the paddlers jump out while the boat is rotated 360 degrees to empty it of water and the new crew climb in and set off. It takes about 30 seconds.

You can also see in the photo two above how good some of the teams are - the unison of stroke & bow in that photo is nearly perfect, and they will keep that up for 26 kms and when they come in it will still be completely in sync.

Getting back to our boat, actually today everyone except the dragonboat has struggled, so not only was the time good, but crew morale has soared. For whatever reason, the weight of the boat today has been an advantage vs. the field. We've passed people! This evening we actually have cautious optimism before dinner.

The race leg finished at Torumbarry, but we actually sleep at Cohuna, about 40 km away. This is the first of a couple of logistic nightmare days where the campsites don't actually coincide with the start & finish points. We have to be up at 4 AM to get to the start for day 5, at Murrabit, a further 60-odd km down the road from Cohuna.

All this is compensated for by the fact that dinner at the Cohuna Bowls club is in air conditioned comfort, so for the first time in about a week we have our core temperature down to something like city normal. It's fantastic. The meal itself was served straight from 1956, but none the worse for that. Unlimited salad, two roasts & 4 vegetables, choice of 4 desserts. The paddlers in particular are using up a lot of energy every day & I didn't spot a lot of leftovers.

Day Four (Race day three)

Possibly because of the decent showers at Picnic Point, or possibly because this is only a 70-odd km stage, there's a more optimistic feel about the camp site this AM. We're still paddling on a "one stage at a time" basis, but that relieves that anxiety & focusses attention on the task at hand. The "in boat" plan has pretty much resolved itself, and we've decided to carry less water in the boat (we started off with 30 liters + individual bottles), because the water just gets too hot - and it really isn't practical to refill individual bottles from a 15 litre tank - , and focus on delivering cold water at as many stages as possible. The heat is a really big issue, more so in a way than the dehydration, and the coldness of the water coming on is the main value of it. (One of the boats that I'm crewing for, the current holders of the women's Hawkesbury classic speed record, i.e. serious pros, take less than 2 liters each for the day; contrast that with our original logistics which revolved around how to get twice that much on per person per day. Note also that yesterday (RD 2) I drank 6 liters of fluid, mainly water, over the course of the day) . Somewhat annoyingly, now that we have this plan in hand, we can't get up to Checkpoint Alpha today (relay teams only), but it is cool in the morning, so we're thinking/hoping that Bravo around 10:30 will be OK for the first water upload.

The start at Picnic Point is actually inside the camping ground, which makes for a relatively stress free morning. We can sleep in until 5:15.

We had some last minute pre-race excitement - the organisers SMS'ed our captain the night before about that start, but mobile phone coverage is patchy at best out here and she hasn't received it. (For grammarians, apologies about the tense control. Really, I hate the historical present, I do, but it just seems to keep slipping itself in). Anyway, the subject of the message was that the dragonboat wouldn't go around the corners on this section of the river, did we want to start downstream? This was about the time I started to fall out of love with the organisers, who had clearly spent about .3 seconds thinking about it.

1.) The dragon boat is shorter & narrower (considerably) than the two largest outriggers, both of which are starting at the start.

2.) Access to the river at checkpoints A or B is impossible for a half-tonne boat that comes off a 14m trailer.

3.) There is actually no bend on this section of river which is even remotely problematic (OK, we didn't know that until after we'd navigated it, but surely it's not beyond the wit of the organisers to know such things in advance. What would it take to check, about 30 minutes in one of the patrol boats?)

I put point B forcefully, and one of the longstanding volunteers said he couldn't see what the problem was (I'm not sure, based on later conversations with this guy, that his being correct was more than coincidence), so finally we ended up starting with all the others. (Not that some of the team weren't excited about starting downstream!)

You can see from the start picture (one of the later starts, not the 7 AM start) that the density of the trees/foliage has changed from the starts on the first two days. This is reinforced along the river; there are no more beaches, and the banks are (very soft) stone, dead branches and leaf litter. There are still recreational campers, but not actually inside the checkpoints and not so much on the literal edges of the river. It's a lot more picturesque, later the RD 3 trip is voted the most picturesque of the five.

It's not quite so easy for me though, because lugging eskies up & down those banks is tricky, and finding somewhere to get the boat in without running over submerged roots/branches is also more problematic. This is to a large extent offset by the fact that hanging around waiting, which I get to do at the 2nd and late checkpoint each day is more pleasant with trees to take shade under.

Very popular with the punters, and one of the race legends; apparently he's deaf and misunderstood paddle for pedal, and the original organisers didn't have the heart to take a stand. Whatever, he probably has the easiest run of it - he makes very good time every day and (it may be an act) looks extremely relaxed whenever I see him. I'm guessing he's the most photographed, unless Chris the paddleboarder has pipped him this year.

His is not the only maverick boat; the other similar design is a hand crank attached to paddle wheels (sorry, no pictures, it was a boat that seemed to come and go in mysterious circumstances, starting and finishing to its own timetable). Somewhat more artistic (including a whistle powered by compressed air), its owner apparently starts a different design every year and has finished twice in 17 attempts. He looked like he was pushing 60 to me, so no mean feat. I don't know about his other boats, but I gave him a hand at one of the checkpoints & this year's entry weighed a serious amount.

On the subject of age, the oldest competitor I've identified is 76. She is paddling in a three-legged relay team, so on the longer days she is paddling upwards of 40 km.

Left is Claire, from another of my five boats. For reasons that are completely obscure to me, kayakers don't wear gloves. None of them. This is a third day blister - Claire went on to win the First Aid tent award for blister of the tournament - waiting for attention in Echuca.

As well as blister of the tournament, Claire came third in the Women's section, just a squeak away on handicap (due to boat) from second.

Our dragon boat crew was pretty battered by the end of the day, but they made good time & seemed to have consolidated the technical lessons from RD 2. Post the large Chinese meal eaten in an Echuca park (the official campsite was a bit grim, but overflow seemed to be a precedent, and we happily went with it. It was a big advantage being able to get a car to the campsite early for scouting and setup), RD 4 looked distinctly possible.

Day Three (Race day two)

Another 5 am start, but people are in a more optimistic mood this AM than last PM, so we are going out to do the best we can. It's a bit of a double whammy to have the second day - which is probably every novice's worst day - as the longest day. Still, the truth of the old cliches that you can't finish if you don't start, and you won't know if you don't try can't really be argued with (except on literary terms, not particularly relevant here). There's no option but to tackle the first two stages, because we can't get the boat out at the first checkpoint, but everybody is prepared to sign on for that.
The campsite & the start at Tocumwal are very close - walking distance if you hadn't paddled a boat 100 km the previous day, probably, but certainly a convenient distance that doesn't impact unduly on the waking up time. There are no dramas with the start. The organisers have rejigged a few of the faster boats' start times, but that doesn't affect us.

The second day is the worst in terms of the roads between checkpoints; there's a kind of sand/clay dust up to 10 cm thick on some of them & it's a little surprising that I managed to stay on road the whole day. The dust is unbelievable; there's no point being within 100 meters for the car in front if you want to actually see where you are going. The shot above is the best of the day two back roads - i.e. one where I felt I could actually take a picture without imperilling my life.
This is gratuitous art really. No particular reason for it other than the organisers significantly overstated the difficulty - or maybe I significantly overestimated the impact of the difficulty on my driving times - of getting between checkpoints, and so I am here early. This is a puddle, BTW, not the actual Murray. The river was at its highest level for years.

A geographer might produce quite an interesting account of this trip, from the bankside view. I didn't actually realise it on Day 2 (where the scenery was very similar to Day 1) but subsequently I came to realise that over the 400 km (river distance) there are really quite significant changes in the supporting landscape. I'm sure that, armed with that knowledge, I couldgo back and revisit days 1 & 2 and find more differences as well. Broadly though, the first 2 days featured very beach-y checkpoints, as here. These were infested by people camping (note motorboat pulled out waiting for paddlers to pass), many of whom were not at all enthralled by being required to move out of the river for the three hours of the race. I gather that on the river itself there was a degree of truculent hostility made alcoholically audible to the passing boats, but possibly protected by numbers the spectators didn't actually hear much abuse. Muted sulking really. One of the interesting features though was that these were/are pretty brutal campsites. They are not nice beaches, in any ocean beach sense. There's as much dust as sand, plenty of stones & nothing like comfortable vegetation cover to put a tent on. OK, there's plenty of camping equipment these days to keep you off the ground and you can haul it all in on a 4WD/trailer, but it still looked a lot to me like making the best of a bad job.

I expressed this idea to a couple of land crew who were also waiting, and was told : These are inland people. They're tough.

That puts me in my place. Still, at least I'm not complaining about the heat. My new friends point out that 38 by day and 24 by night is luxury camping weather. In their last Mildura holiday, it was 44 in the day and 36 at night.

Oh.

One of the other problems we had with the big boat and the small land crew, was finding an appropriate place to beach the boat. Here you can see the smaller kayak making a beeline for shore & refreshments, while our crew has to head another couple of hundred meters downstream to park. And I have to chase them carrying 15 kilos of water and an esky.

RD 2 had a curious, somewhat paradoxical end. Chris, the paddleboarder & our coach, pulled out at checkpoint Bravo (I keep wanting to say Beta) - we were amazed that he'd actually started the day because he looked so bad at the end of RD 1 - but he jumped on board the dragon boat at Charlie for a combination coaching/assisting/motivational stint. We also got a volunteer first aid official on board, thanks Seja, who was invaluable over the course of the race, helping me out bank-side when she wasn't paddling herself.

Anyway, halfway between Charlie & Delta we started to feel the heavy hand of the clock on our collective shoulders, and eventually accepted a tow from the control boat for the last 7 km of the 4th stage. That meant we had to pull out of day 2, and skip the last 12 km stage. What was odd was that, although that looks like some kind of failure superficially, in reality something happened on day 2 (in the boat) that meant on days 3, 4 & 5 there was never any danger of not finishing. On the last three days, despite all the problems with the boat & the heat, the dragonboat was a powerhouse and consistently beat its own checkpoint goals (well, my calculated goals for it, anyway). Whereas on days 1 & 2 the main question was, will we make the checkpoint in time?, on days 3 thru' 5 there didn't really seem to be any question of that at all.

Pulling the boat out at Delta wasn't the only drama though. The "main" road was out because a bridge was down, so we had to bring the trailer in, & the boat out, the long way around, via Charlie. Still, despite all this, when we finally got into Picnic Point, there was a good feeling about the place. And great showers at the camping ground. And a bus to take us to an airconditioned club for dinner. Michael & Martin, ground crew for transport & logistics, had excelled again.

Except for one tent, which sadly, I have become the sole expert in. Still, it doesn't take long.

Day Two (Race day one)

Up at five AM to; eat breakfast; pack tent; put boat in water; start racing.

Modern camping technology almost makes me consider camping as a legitimate recreational activity. I have been known to describe it as somewhere beteeen 5th & 6th class accommodation, but I could possibly think about it moving up to 4th. Anyway, tents pack down (and go up) in about 10 minutes which is handy. It's no harder to make real coffee (via a french press addition to the billy) than it would be to make instant, and substantially better for my mood. (I did actually burn myself, later in the week, when I put too much coffee in the press, but that's not really a camping incident. More of a stumbling around at 4 am incident.) Liz has actually pre-packed all her meals for the week, so it's sort of just a question of getting dressed & grabbing the bag. I was worried about the AM routine before we left, but in reality every morning ran pretty smoothly.

I'm sure the paddlers were nervous - if "trepidatious" was a word, I think it would probably be more accurate -, but the road crew was already busy. Our waiting around (nervous, in my case, about whether I could find another place to stock up on water between checkpoints) came in the middle of the day. Not just our paddlers either - every other morning except the first we had no trouble getting volunteers to help move the boat, but on the first day everybody was very focussed and inward-looking. Since most of them had done it before and actually knew what they were in for, I can't say I blame them.

The guy on the left, Chris, aka Zeus, is taking his last rest for the day. He paddles that thing standing up, and he spent the next 12 hours on his feet paddling 90 km. He's our coach. I'm not sure if you could call him attention seeking, but if you google the 2009 Murray marathon, I think you'll find his name more than any other. If he wasn't on commission from the paddleboard company, then he ought to have been. there must have been 20 people queuing up to try it after the finish in Swan Hill.

Marshalling was at 6:40 for a 7 am start (to be adjusted later for the quicker boats, but that was never going to be us, so these times were typical). We were nearly late once, but not today.

The race gun was something of an antique; I suspect it may have been in use since 1968, which is when the race was first held. It made a substantial noise. The case in which it lives, along with its backup, has a participation medal attached to the outside for each year it has been used. I didn't count them, but there were a lot. This was the 41st year, and the 1st year it has been run by the YMCA as opposed to the Red Cross.

(The more alert amongst you may have spotted that the background in this picture is not the same as the other Race Day one pictures. Correct. Well spotted. This picture comes from RD 3, but in narrative terms it belongs here. Cue discussion by Errol Morris, for those interested in the mechanics & ethics of photography)

I didn't get many good pictures of the start; this is the clearest but it is missing the stroke & the sweep. The video gives a better idea, but you will have to track it down on Youtube, because yet again I cannot persuade this platform to sensibly link to a video. Still, you can see the whole crew in the picture above.

The guy in the straw hat to the left ended up being the 2nd last person home. In fact, I think he passed us for the only time in the final stretch of the river outside Swan Hill.

Anyway.

At least there was one spectator who didn't have family members in the race.

Day One

Boxing Day 2009.

We needed to be in Yarrawonga by 1800 hours for the briefing, but we thought it would be more pleasant to arrive in the early afternoon and set up camp without undue stress and generally ease into the event. There was a lot of improvisation to be done in terms of managing loads, campsites & road crewing the boat, but seeing all the physical components in one place made it easier to judge things like space & weight.

I'm not promising a coherent blog - this one has been cobbled together non-synchronously and editing in the photos just isn't that easy. This is some of the group unpacking at Yarrawonga. Note the manager of the roadcrew supervising from a seated position, while crew stand around looking busy. Roles were reversed for the next five days. Paddlers will tell you sitting down is overrated.

The organisers provided what they probably thought was a lot of information, but actually from the point of view of a group of first timers, the information was pretty much useless. (And, jumping ahead a few days, often ... inaccurate ...)

Here you can see a couple of boats being taken in for scrutineering. If you look closely at the boat on wheels (smart idea!) you will see that it is in fact a paddle boat, powered by pedals. One of three in the race, but not the one that finished. The yellow kayak behind is carried in a more typical way - by boatmen, not an engineer. It did finish. A modern kayak weighs (roughly) 10-12 kg per occupant (less as they get more occupants). Contrast this with the 30+kg per occupant of the dragon boat and you will have some idea of why our team wasn't first home. Although, given our boat would fit 20, and only carrried 12, I wonder what damage we could do with a full boat.

Wanting to arrive early and not keen on long drives/early starts, we stayed on Christmas night in Gundagai at a pleasing (very small) motel. Excerpts from the guests' welcome included "Please do not mistake our TV remotes for your mobile phone" and "These are non-smoking rooms. Please step outside for filtered air." The proprietor was very friendly but I was unable to determine if the irony was conscious or unconscious. He had the air of someone teetering on the precipice of sarcasm, with a genuinely warm smile. He could be hosting a TV talent show with that combination. OTOH, it's probably more rewarding running a small motel in Gundagai.

It was hot in Yarrawonga, but for the first time in about 15 years, I was hot without being sticky. It's not often you'll find me nostalgic about Victoria. The dry heat is, especially after many years away, almost refreshing. It looks a bit brutal with those tents in the direct sunlight but they cool down pretty quickly after dark.

The problem at the campsites was more noise than heat. Here we ended up between two schools' teams, and unsurprisingly they were up later than us.