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...