Recently...

This is Rhodes at 6:00 AM, early Spring, when it was still hot. Hard to believe it's a post-industrial wasteland. That water is so toxic they won't allow fishing in it. If I rotated the camera 180 degrees you'd see a shopping mall & office block with no redeeming architectural merit. Truly, happiness in life is the product of tunnel vision, partial blindness and the ability to see the world like a salesman desperate for the first commission of the month.

The dawn haze is probably dust & fumes from the out of shot freeway. Still looks nice though, doesn't it.

More selective viewing from the Tempe Motor Boat Association moorings.

No sign of the airport, the Princes Highway. It's a beautiful piece of the world, strangely. Hard to see, but unmistakably there once seen. Because Liz and I are
down here regularly,  I like to find new things to see. The red is quite striking, in contrast with the white, and the surface of the water belies the famous Cooks River  toxins. There's no wind, and that makes the reflection particularly appealing.

 This has apeared at Garrison Point recently (which I think I've mentioned elsewhere, and was the location of my second cycling video). It's a very striking piece about the relationship between indigenous and colonised; it looks like it is intended to appear kinetic while not actually moving - certainly the wind was strong enough to make any reasonably balanced and bearing'ed windmill turn, and this has an interior that looks like an axle. However, it's is seriously solid. Maybe it needs a hurricane (Hornsby had  tornado recently, so it's not impossible). Maybe it need a wind strong enough to evict the colonisers...

 Also seen at Garrison Point was this guy, stalking around somewhat tentatively. It's a masked lapwing, so far as I know. Part of the chain of reserves along the Georges river through this part of Sydney is Lake Gillawarna, which is an extraordinary reserve, densely packed with a few species of the larger water birds. Ibis, mainly, which are a bit of a pest although you can't blame them for adapting successfully to techno-urban living. It's not like it was their idea to invent garbage bins and concentrate all the water is limited areas. But I'm sure they make it tough on smaller birds. (Speaking of which, I took a bunch of the students along the TVT from Bardwell Park to Tempe Station; we were luck to see a

couple of red-browed firetails - although they were moving too quickly for photographs, so I wouldn't argue with anyone who said different).

Finally, a tap. I may have finally got the manual aperture to work on my way-too-automatic camera, because this has the exact shallow depth of field I was looking for. I like taps. I took a very similar picture at Tallowa Dam, as I recall. Below is the opposite shot, although this was an accident with the auto focus. I'm sure there's art in the combination of them, somehow.

Taree 2013

The trip to Taree is about 350 km and if you get away from Sydney quickly it's a pretty easy trip up the freeway to Newcastle & then back on the upgraded Pacific Highway - which is a disgraceful excuse for a road except where upgraded, BTW - for the final stages. It's wet country, lots of rivers and bush which probably merit further exploration, but it's also motorboat country, which makes the waterways a lot less appealing. It's also school-holiday territory; myriads of cheap motels, caravan parks and truly appalling food. Our motel was fine, if a little 2-star, and the host was really genuinely warm.

I discovered a "panorama" function on the camera, which solves the wide-angle problem nicely; this is the bank of the Manning River, with the marquees of the better-organised clubs set up along the bank. The gap between the white and orange tents is the allocated space for us - we weren't quite on top of the organisation and logistics department.

Liz was paddling for a combined Penrith/Sandy Point team; pretty much the only Sydney teams there. Dragon boating is, somewhat bizarrely, Australia's fastest growing sport (off a very small base, I guess) and it's startling how many rural areas have one or two (it seems to be a very political sport, there's hardly a club that wasn't born out a split with another club) crews. Macleay River ended up winning all three divisions (Open, Womens & Mixed),  defeating one of two Newcastle clubs in each of the finals. I've

never heard of the Macleay River! They paddle, I'm informed, in the "Russian style", that is, low rate (around 60 strokes a minute) with a lot of power. Hunter Dragons use an "Asian style", around 80+ strokes a minute.

Liz' boat did pretty well, considering they could only put 16 paddlers into 20 seats, plus they had 3 paddlers at their first regatta. They improved each race, and they beat their own targets. If a couple of races had been 20 metres longer they would have finished higher, but they didn't quite manage to tie their finishing sprints.

Note the nice parallel lines of the leading two paddlers.

Saturday night we had the regatta dinner at the local club; possibly the worst food I've paid for in a long long time, although the steak wasn't completely abominable. Still, next time we're there we might try the Indian food. I did hear, once I got back to Sydney, that there's a wood-fired pizza place about 5km out of town (trying to avoid the health department) which is very good, but it's not easy to believe. Still, the people were pleasant, and food isn't everything, despite Masterchef and various bake-off-based reality TV shows.

We got away at about 12:30 Sunday - the regatta was superbly run - and were back in Sydney around 5, so another pretty good trip. The right glute was a bit sore from all that driving; sadly, my physio says that isn't going to go away, but it's a lot better now than it was before the treatment, plus I can run at pretty much full pace now. Last week I managed three consecutive runs; this week I'll try for four. Anyway, Hawkesbury's coming! And sailing will be back on the agenda soon, if this weather keeps up.

A quick trip around Sydney Park

parkrun - 2 

Beautiful morning, nice run, felt much stronger than the last one. Not that my perception of how I'm running, and the actual data, ever seem to match particularly well. I forgot the turn off the device as I came over the line, so I'll have to wait for the organisers to tell me my time. But the first 4k were definitely faster.

And I came 78th! Last time it was 80th!

Garrison Point

I had a few problems with the video technology, so I don't have the whole 20k trip, but this is one for the fragments (speeded up to avoid tedium) from my comeback bike ride. I've been off the bike for most of the rehab from the torn hamstring origin because the hamstring wasn't really comfortable with effort under compression. This trip was a bit of a tester, the day after my first continuous run, and top speed is about running speed - so the sped up video is still slower than Tour de France pace.

Cabramatta Creek was the tributary that got me lost; I set off on one side of the Georges River assuming that if I crossed the river at some point, and kept the river on the same side of me (left, as it happened, I was cycling widdershins) I would get back to the start. I didn't think about tributaries - if I'd kept this on the left I'd have ended up in god knows where (well, actually, Cabramatta). Fortunately, I got suspicious and had the mobile phone with universal street directory, and so was able to plot a way back to the car.

Garrison Point (below) was probably first spotted by white guys when Matthew Flinders sailed up the Georges River, which he did in a 12 foot (that's 1 foot longer than my dinghy, and about 3 feet shorter than Liz's canoe, and he sailed/rowed in it from Port Jackson out of the Heads, down to Botany Bay, and then up to roughly Bankstown) skiff as practice for his later trip down the East coast. I can recommend his diary - I read it on my phone (you can get if for free as an e-book, I guess the Kindle would have access to it) - as it's extraordinarily matter of fact. It's full of details, and helps quite a lot to clarify how resourceful a successful explorer needed to be.

Bankstown hasn't really benefited from being Sydney's first inland settlement. It's a very raggedy-ann suburb, main roads, secondary airports, warehouses and cheap housing. You'd think having a quite decent river in a place as water-view-sensitive as Sydney would've been enough to make it a prestige suburb, but it just hasn't quite made it. Strange. It isn't making much of its history either, but perhaps, since a lot of that history was agricultural, it has been largely erased.

Be that as it may, this section of the Georges River, Garrison Point, Chipping Norton, and Prospect Creek is very pleasant, and likewise popular. Apart from winter, any weekend here is busy with picnickers, fishermen, runners, cyclists, motor boat enthusiasts, canoeists and indeed, I saw a R/C yacht club racing somewhere along my path.

(I googled Garrison Point; it is allegedly the spot that Bass & Flinders disembarked, although the name came later)

In fact I ran a race here last year, at Mirrambeena Reserve (everything seems to have multiple names - I think each name attracts funding from a different piece of legislation) and there is a serious running club based here which organises regular runs; you can see the course markings at some places on the Garrison Point video. There is a ton of birdlife; there's an island which is by way of being a bit of a bird reserve. I can't speak with any authority on the vegetation, except that I suspect it is very largely re-plantings. The only tree that I recognise is the pretty much inevitable casuarina. They don't let a lot grow around them once they settle in, their leaf litter is pretty toxic.

I was pretty surprised by how quiet it was, really, because it was a glorious afternoon. On the other hand, it may have been more glorious than the forecast, and it's not a place you can easily pop down to - it's part of Car World.

I was very surprised - very unpleasantly surprised - when after about 12 km I caught sight of Warwick Farm racecourse. I don't have a very unified map of Sydney in my mind; I know it in pieces and the pieces don't fit together very well. I know Warwick Farm well from when we first moved to Sydney - but in my mind it was nowhere near where I thought we were. Well, obviously it was, but it was a quite a surprise to me. Irritatingly, there is a bike path along the river on the maps, but Warwick Farm has a fence that prevents bicycles from actually accessing it, so I had to cycle around the racetrack on a couple of substantially main roads. I suppose I should consider my success a confidence booster for daily commuting, but it takes a certain degree of obliviousness. In a way there's no point being careful - it's not the cyclist that's particularly relevant in the physics of being hit by a truck - but despite that I prefer to concentrate for all I'm worth in case that proves to be useful. Quite stressful, but, to be fair, no-one tried to hit me.

It's amazing how committed to the car some places are - great chunks of road don't even bother with footpaths, because who would walk there? Of course, they're right, even though it does seem like a self fulfilling policy. No-one would walk next to a 6 lane highway. Naturally, when the road came into being, people didn't need footpaths, because they could walk on the roads.

Eventually anyway, I made it back to the car just in time to help Liz out of the water. I hadn't been planning to ride quite so far, but I was pleased to have made it without any leg problems.

Sailing away (1)

I'm learning to sail. I had two lessons from a professional during which it became apparent that I wasn't going to excel at this any time soon. I hate that. I like being a promising student, but in a boat, I'm just inept. I think I'll be coining new words for inept by the time I've finished.

My strategy is therefore to skulk off and practice by myself for a while. When I get up to the level of a typical two-lesson student, I'll go back for lesson three. Since a lesson costs $160, it's the only sensible thing to do; I can probably buy a small yacht for the price of learning to sail it. I've compromised and picked up a small dinghy (2nd hand from Balmoral Sailing Club) for something less than the price of learning to tack. Martin (a handy colleague from school) and I spent Saturday AM building a dolly for it out of offcuts from the theatrical set-builder's studio around the corner, and Monday I took it out solo for the first time.

Home made dolly

So, there's a lot to wrap the trainee sailor's mind around. First, the good news - some things don't matter as much as you might think. Rigging a boat is quite tricky, but there's quite a lot you can get wrong and the thing still goes. I'm not saying it wouldn't go better if all the rigging was right, but I've "experimented" with three ways of attaching the sail, and I'm pleased to say that the most recent - which I worked out by myself and appears to bear no resemblance to either of the two instruction manuals I found online - is clearly right. To be fair to the manual writers, I'm pretty sure that I'll go back and read one of them again (I think there are actually different riggings over the 57 year history of the design) and realise that I completely failed to understand what it clearly and simply explained the first time. Anxiety can do that to you.

My dinghy has a halyard (to hold the top of the sail up) and a downhaul (to hold the bottom of the sail down) - don't go sailing based on these instructions! - plus a horse aka a traveller, which attaches the mainsheet to the deck and also seems to hold down the tiller, as well as a vang, which I think might be a kicker in the manual, and of course, a cunningham, possibly the more poetic name for the outhaul. That's five lines and eight names. Thanks to a generously minded passing onlooker, who waded in when he realised that on-shore coaching wouldn't be adequate, I've discovered that your vang, downhaul and cunningham can all be less tight that recommended without seriously inconveniencing a sailor of my expertise. In fact, given that I capsized AFTER fixing all these minor details, loose rigging doesn't appear to be wholly disadvantageous. Plus, you can have a tangled horse and a very wrong mainsheet and still actually sail from A to B - so long as you define B as the point you get to after leaving A and eventually deciding to go no further. (There's no shame in walking the boat back to the landing ramp - but remember to hold it by the bow!)

So, rigging is less critical than you might think. And like everything, one failed attempt to do it by myself was worth three or four attempts to follow someone else's instructions and/or example. I'm pretty sure I will get the thing exactly right next time. Well, maybe the time after. And even for all the mistakes, the only one with a real mechanical failing was the mainsheet, which I failed to rig to exploit the mechanical advantage of the block and tackle involved. Here my gym-related diligence probably paid off - I'm a lot stronger than I used to be - more than a 2:1 mechanical advantage, maybe.

Anyway, rigged, tick. Launched, tick. Thanks to Martin for the dolly-building and the old guy who didn't speak English who helped me launch and watched my shoes. I was able to un-launch later by myself, so I think a couple more goes with the dolly and I'll be right in both directions. In a way, the trickiest thing is keeping hold of the boat while getting the dolly back out of the water.

The rigging is, in fact, the trivial part of the exercise. The boat on the water is vastly more difficult. The first problem is fluky winds. I was at Rodd Point, and I'm pretty sure the wind on the point was not blowing in the same direction as the wind on the water. It certainly wasn't blowing as hard near the shore as it was 50 meters out, although an alternative scenario is that it took me 50 meters to get the boat, rudder and sail pointing simultaneously in the right direction. Once done, however, the thing took off, beam reaching (probably) up a storm until I decided to change direction. Then, and I've no idea how, since I'm sure I decided to gybe, I found myself "in irons", which means facing windward (as in tacking, not gybeing), and consequently, not moving. This means I must have tacked by mistake, and I know I've always had trouble with left and right, but even calling them port and starboard can't convince me that I did actually head starboard. I suspect that in fact I had managed to "beam reach" myself on to a windward tack, because let me tell you that knowing where you are and what direction you are travelling in is, strictly speaking, impossible. To start with, the boat doesn't travel particularly in the line you are pointing the rudder, unless perhaps you're sailing downwind. Probably every sailor knows that - I think it's physics, but it's not very intuitive. It seems like you're sort of sliding/skidding across the water; whether or not it's possible to keep a straight wake, and what it would mean if you did, I haven't fathomed* yet. (*Nautical pun alert) To add complexity to this is the fact that the boat wants, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, to head upwind. That is, to stop. The goal of all those forces acting on the boat is to reduce themselves to zero. It's a battle out there. I want to go somewhere; the boat doesn't. That kind of behaviour is exactly what I don't like about horses, and I'm sure no-one ever mentioned it about boats. Maybe the boat got me in irons before I decided I wanted to gybe. Maybe I gybed through 270 degrees (no, it's possible, I never wrote up my first lesson, but trust me, you can gybe a long way), who knows. Anyway, I felt like a dill, doing nothing at all in the middle of nowhere very much, but I do in fact know what to do in this situation, sort of. One up for voracious reading: you sail backwards until you are going fast enough to sail forwards. Knowing it isn't quite enough to make it sound plausible, and doing it seemed a lot more like waiting for something to happen (which it eventually did), but another bout of incompetence circumvented made me feel quite cheerful.

There's a lot more...can one blog entry stand it? Note this is a short 1 hour episode, not a multi-day epic.

I'm sorry there are no pictures, but my sporting self-glorification camera isn't waterproof, so I wasn't wearing it. Sadly that means my spectacular capsize, and surprisingly semi-competent righting of the boat went unrecorded. I'm glad I've spent the last 6 months learning to swim properly, because it's one less thing to worry about; in point of fact swanning around in salt water in a life jacket isn't particularly difficult, but if you're as stressed by water as I was 6 months ago it's hard to find the mental energy to work out exactly what to do next. Righting the boat may not be difficult, but getting back into it while it tries to sail itself (or capsize again) requires a bit of thought/good fortune. Like everything, I know more about this for next time. I rather think that the first sailing lesson should be( 1) how to capsize & (2) just try to sail, followed by a prolonged debriefing. Well, I've always liked learning that way. I'm not very good at turning theory into practice - I'm much better at enlightening practice with retrospective theory. Of course, that's all very well and good, but I still have to work out how to gybe (risk of capsize) or tack (risk of stalling) or I'll be condemned to sail in straight lines for ever.

I haven't mentioned recognising the buoys that warn you about shallow water, avoiding windsurfers and canoes, sticky centreboards, detachable tillers and ... no, I think that's about it. Oh, wait, I didn't finish the bit about knowing where you are...not only does the boat want to steer in its own direction, plus the wind shifts around in a superficially random way, but water all looks the same in every direction. Unless you pay a lot of attention to landmarks you could sail in circles (except that you can't actually sail in a circle) for eternity.

But, lest it all sounds a bit horrendous, let me note that the bits in between the bits described here, the bits where your're bumping along at what seems like quite a reasonable speed (walking is quicker, but sailing feels faster), are fantastic. And coping with stuff going wrong is very cheerful after you get home and under a hot shower. So, apparently, there's no downside - although I haven't been thumped in the head by a boom yet. And it's good to have water at the end of summer, it would be a lot colder in January (It has to do with currents, apparently).

I can't quite see myself racing yet, but I can see myself wanting to try.

(On a related note, I started Matthew Flinders' diary over the Easter weekend, courtesy Gutenburg (free e-books) and am/was shocked at the navigational challenges of the 17th and 18th centuries. It wasn't impossible for charts to be out by 10 degrees - as much as 600 nautical miles. OK, Australia's big enough to bump into anyway, but what bit of it were you bumping into? Even once longitude got sorted out, theoretically, people couldn't afford the chronometers. Cook used the rival "lunar distance" method, which wasn't much chop either. Running into islands must have been more good luck that good management.)

(Plus, drinking water...I'd assumed evaporation would have been standard, but Flinders talks admiringly about somebody's "ingenious device", meaning a desalination still, so it clearly wasn't common)

The Boat

I know it looks like it's a long way from the water, but this is the new (to me) boat rigged for the first time, largely, I have to admit, due to the assistance of a passerby called Trent who certainly knew a lot more than I could work out from the instructions. I got the boat already half-rigged, and now I can see that some of what's there is a bit creative. That appears to be the nature of boats, on my limited experience to date - a lot of improvisation, so long as they go.

I'm not actually planning to race it, so it probably won't matter. My current ambition is to sail it across Botany Bay and back. This is, despite its apparent modesty, NOT happening any time soon.

I don't have a picture of me sailing it, because I'm not actually confident enough to take the camera out in it yet (I'm pretty sure I can turn it upside down without thinking too hard), but Jakub (my sailing teacher and former language student) helped me take it out on its maiden voyage.

Sailing people are pretty friendly - this is near the Dobroyd Sailing Club on Rodd Point in Iron Cove - and about five people stopped to ask what it was, and another couple stopped to say they'd sailed them in the dim and distant past. Plus, of course, Trent. The Club has given me a list of times when their safety boat is out, and invited me to take comfort from its presence. I will.

Days 2 and 3

The start on Day 2 - notice in the background the terrific job the organisers do with the toilet logistics; they manage to get 3-4 portables in to every checkpoint and believe me some of the roads in are not hospitable. (Admittedly, city boy with very small 4WD perspective - they all drive super-monsters down here, probably think the roads are flat). Another river feature (sorry about the picture quality, I have no idea what's going on here) is the amount of trees near the surface of the river - it's incredibly shallow.

It's also not very straight - nowhere more poignantly illustrated than checkpoint D on Day 2, where you can see the boats coming downstream, then walk 30 metres through some bush to wait for them at the checkpoint, which for them is still 2km away. Day 2 is a long day; in neither 2009 nor 2012 did my paddlers get to the end.

This is a popular checkpoint with tourists/visitors - I guess it's advertised somewhere. You can get an idea that not all the checkpoints have ready access to the boats - these little cliffs make it tricky to get in and out of the boat, and also to get in and out of the river to hold the boat, and plenty of checkpoints have much higher banks than these.

Liz managed 28 km on day 2, and in fact hit her peak speed of over 8 kph trying to escape the 'grim reaper'. The wind probably costs 1-2 kph because the canoe has a.) no keel nor skeg to help it maintain a line and b.) high sides which make a big target and c.) an open top (unlike the kayaks here) which means the wind not only pushes on the outside of the windward side of the boat but also the inside of the "downwind" side. The Murray is both windy and unpredictable, in that the wind is affected by the dramatic variation in the density of the bankside bushland.

The two smaller pictures illustrate the main riverbank landscape, I'm thinking this purple thing is not indigenous. Hard to imagine a better place to encapsulate a lot of stereotypical images of, say, Lawson's kind of Australia (even though his bit was generally further north, and bits of that that I've seen are substantially more bleak than even the human impacted landscapes here)

Days 1 and 2

 By far the vast majority of the boats were kayaks, but this one stood out somewhat for stylishness. Apparently an ex-AIS boat, and likewise apparently used in the 2000 Olympics - although I find it hard to believe it was used for racing in 2000, it's an 18 kg (light for timber, OK, but heavy for racing) monster in a world of carbon fibre - it glows with the kind of inner light that highly polished timber and excellent marine varnish can provide. It was also pretty quick - it's a racing kayak by design and temperament. It attracted a lot of favourable comments - no matter how attuned to technology, people still appreciate the traditional crafts. Liz' boat also attracted attention for its combination of traditional shape, combined with advanced materials (kevlar).

This photo was taken in the marshalling area for the day 1 half-marathon start. You can see the boats are on stools to avoid damage from the tree detritus on the ground. We'll be doing that next time too.

 This is Checkpoint C for Day 1, a place called Thompsons Beach near Cobram, billed as the largest inland beach in the Southern hemisphere - well, maybe so. It's a pleasant enough spot, but I feel I should point out that the river here is 50 metres wide and about 1 metre deep - children were walking from one bank to the other without getting their hair wet. It's not an awe-inspiring place; not quite the mental picture I have of mighty rivers (obviously not the river's fault). Same place below, but different angle - it makes quite a startling difference

 On the right is the Day 2 start - pretty much the last of the beach-y venues. This place, like TB above, is actually genuinely sandy rather than primarily mud/dust and you can see the campers in the background.

I took the below picture for the four layers - but now I can't think of that much to say about it.

You can see a couple of the significant differences between a racing kayak and  Canadian canoe in this picture. It's not surprising the kayak is faster, but OTOH, if you were making a living out of what you could carry in your boat downstream, it's pretty clear which one you'd choose. The racing kayaks are also really tippy; I saw one guy all out just because he found himself halfway into an eddy. The canoe starts of being pretty tippy, but then the secondary curve (hard to see here) aka the tumblehome kicks in to stabilise it. All good for a hunting boat, again, but in general narrow bottom equals fast

Murray 2012 - Getting there & Day 1

The race started on the 27th December, but we left on Christmas Day because we could combine Christmas lunch with Liz' sister and mother (and nieces and brother-in-law) in Queanbeyan with an easy 2 stage drive to Cobram, which was the location of the campsite for the first 2 nights, and also the site of the scrutineering. The easy 2 stage drive allows for a less stressful trip, and it's not like life is so busy that  we can't enjoy the luxury of travelling slowly. Plus, with my tendonitis, sitting, and particularly driving, for more than about 45 minutes is agony, so even with sharing the driving multiple changeovers figured to make the trip pretty slow.

We usually stop in Gundagai on these trips, so I booked the usual place. Well, I thought I'd booked the usual place until we arrived and there was no record of the booking. I waved the confirmation email - only to discover, mid-wave, that it was the 2009 confirmation email. At least I noticed it micro-seconds before it had to be pointed out to me. And, fortunately, they had a room. Plus, even more fortunately, I managed to  work out where my booking was and cancel it without a penalty fee. That, I think, is the spirit of the 21st century techno-Christmas. That storm went straight on to
Sydney where it took care of watering our garden for us, and refilled the fish pond.

I don't think this is the main street, but we didn't really have time to explore the whole town. About three shops down from this sign is a shop that is completely demolished with the sole exception of its window, frontage and door, so that as you walk towards it you reach a point where there's a sudden transition from shop to nothing - because as soon as you are opposite the glass it ceases to make any impression at all. The idea of the shop completely vanishes from the mind - it's quite startling. A picture doesn't capture the effect of the transition.

Something bad must have happened on the Hume, because all the traffic was being detoured through Wagga down to Albury (that's one hell of a detour). We decided that having got as far as Wagga it would be quicker to drive cross-country to Cobram, via places I'd never heard of, such as Lochart, and Urana. And Nyora and Berrigan. This picture was taken somewhere near one of them. Lockhart (I think) has a sculptor, because there's nearly as much public art there as in the whole of Sydney, and Lockhart is too small to have a sign telling you what its population is. (I don't know how small that makes it, but as a guide, I did see one place with a Pop. 243). Liz is actually vaguely familiar with this region, as a result of a stint in Tumut for 2 years immediately post graduation, at which time Wagga was the home of Tumut's pizza shop. She knows things like the fact that The Rock - we missed it - has the most fiercely competitive sporting teams of the region. Roads, she says, have been built specially to The Rock, just to make sporting access easier*.
 This is the camping ground at Cobram, and more particularly, this is (some of) the boats lined up for scrutineering. You may notice that Liz' boat - the central yellow beast - is the only Canadian canoe amidst a sea of kayaks. This is because kayaks travel roughly twice as fast as canoes for an equivalent amount of labour, which makes them popular with the "functional" classes. People with aesthetic sensibilities, though, prefer canoes. Over the course of the 5 days, many people sympathised with Liz' excellent taste. But it was certainly a great way to make friends. You can get a

 good idea of the difference between city and country from the scrutineering. At the Hawkesbury, scrutineering takes about 20-30 minutes per boat - for safety reasons. At Cobram, we needed to attach the race number, and one suggestion from the scrutineers was that we drill holes in the flotation tank and attach it there. Fortunately, an alternative was found. Scrutineering takes 30 seconds. Is it a boat? Does it have a number? Are you a paddling lifeform? OK, thanks, get that number sorted out before tomorrow.

(The little Suzuki 4WD in the background is ours)

 Liz was doing the half-marathon, in point of fact, and the start was typically at Checkpoint B, the first one of which you can see here. People are generally camping at these places in a general recreational way, so we're a bit invasive. It could be said that we provide much needed excitement, but not all the campers see it that way. While the canoes are on the river, their motor boats can't be, and there's a degree of passive hostility around most places. Mind you, we, the racers, are a tad self-righteous, so maybe we provoke some of it.

That "sand" BTW, is actually clay. 10 minutes of rain turns it into the kind of mud that prefigured cement in building the pyramids. Otherwise it's dust.

This is Liz boat - the Lizt - set up for the race. The wire basket contains a Garmin for GPS (for post-race analysis, it's quite hard to get lost**), a waterproof loudspeaker to help fight off boredom with music, and a tennis ball attached to a rope for throwing to rescuers if required.  Under the seat another wire basket contains food, and there's emergency water fore and aft the seat. The life jacket contains the main 2-litre supply of water and Gatorade. Attached to the crossbar (thwart?) is the emergency bag and (out of sight) a bailer. That's it. All you need to paddle 100 kilometers (a full stage on Days 1 and 2)





* This is not likely to be true, no matter how competitive they are in The Rock
** Although someone did