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Day 18 - 2 Dunes east of Lynnies Junction to Poolowanna - Thurs 29 Oct 2015
We are all getting hot, dry, tired and dirty. This is anything but average.
Today we had a big plan to push further into the Simpson Desert along the WAA Line. The plan was for the bikes to get away early, real early, and once they had done their distance stop in a temporary hoochie. Hopefully before the day really heated up, they would hole up at a nice camp spot and wait for the support team to come along. The bikes had been skipping along quite well but the cars were only averaging around 25kms an hour. Yesterday we had used the ‘catch-up’ method and it wasn’t that great, forcing the riders to sit around waiting for the cars and to run late in the day in heavy heat.
And so the camp was up really early, mostly the bike guys, and ready to go. After a couple of test runs in the dawn light they headed off, leaving the road crew to finish packing up and push off after them. As the road crew finished off the packing up, they thought that they heard a bike. Nah, couldn’t be, they had gone a while ago. Hang on, there it was again. Sure enough, shortly after the initial noise, Carl swung back into the camp, slowly followed by the rest of the crew. A call had been made. Their brief experience on the WAA line was tough enough for bikes and would definitely be too tough for the cars with the trailers. We would go back a little and head down the Rig Road. It turned out to be a good call. The forecast that we could recall had the heat easing off today, relatively speaking. It was not to be.
Early on the bikes were fine, even waiting to film the cars a time or two before pressing on. The three cars and two trailers battled on in slow-ish conditions. The initial southward track ran between the swales and was ok, tending to corrugated. When we swung to the east to traverse across the dunes we slowed a bit more. Mostly we were ok with the occasional couple of goes at a dune. Again Big Scotty pulled off a masterful display of backing a heavy trailer back down a sand dune to slip the big Troopy into low 4 and power up the soft, sandy dune.
From a bike perspective it was as hard as it gets, even harder. As Robdog McNally describes it ”You start perspiring from the moment you put on your protective bike gear; you know from that point forward that you were going to lose a lot of fluid for the day”. Some did a dynamic risk assessment and decided that the risk of dehydration was greater than the risk of falling off and the control they introduced was to just wear light cowboy-style outdoor shirts and no protective gear. Rob continues: “From the moment of starting the motorbike instead of having sections where you can rest a bit, sit down, catch your breath, you were constantly up on the pegs, working to control the bike, concentrating hard on picking the right line in the soft sand, being physically and mentally drained. The bottom line was that we had already had a couple of days of this and we had days to go”.
Overnight rehabilitation and recovery was very difficult, if not impossible, due to the high overnight heat. Carl recalls some of the difficulties: “Rob and I were lagging behind the other guys and so we didn’t get fresh sand. It’s easier if you are the first bike out on virgin sand; we had to cut our way and pick our way through the tracks of the previous bikes. A lot of the time I would go up the middle of the dune which was softer but un-broken. Carl describes his dune technique: “I would be in second or third gear, standing up on the pegs manoeuvring my weight to either side to keep the bike in line. The bike tends to want to go its own way so you try and let it do that but keep it to the track. It’s a constant fight, there is no rest”. Track features called ‘whoops’ were also an issue. These are big scallops out of the track that were filled with sand. They are irregular and some were big enough to swallow a bike. The boys would be riding along and hit one of these, unsettling and fully compressing the suspension, rebounding them like a pogo stick. Sometimes these were continuous. On the WAA line that the guys tested, Carl hit a big one and was thrown into the side embankment of the track coming to a dead stop. When returning from WAA early in the day Rob took a fall. The dunes look like a wave in cross section, with the peaks and crests curling over, travelling towards the west. Rob went up pretty hard as it was a 30 metre high dune; he needed a lot of momentum. It’s very hard to judge and he had a little bit too much on and overcooked it at the top. As you came off the crest the bike became airborne, assumed a nose down attitude and crashed back down on the track with Rob under the bike, twisting and jamming his ankle and wrist under the bike. Tough bastard that he is he only cried for a second (it was most likely sweat running into his eyes). The other riders were hard on his heels and he was lying in the middle of the track. With help from Brock to right the bike he kept on moving.
It was a day where we had to keep on moving; as Brock said “It was hot.” The mechanical genius also took a tumble, twisting his knee under the bike. In three days we had four falls resulting in a bang to the head, a dislocated shoulder and soft tissue injuries. And these were only the major falls. There were many more soft and semi-soft landings. Even Joc fell over once or twice, dirtying his cowboy shirt. However the falls at this stage were the lesser of the evils. The heat was the thing that was cooking us. This kind of riding is hard enough in normal weather like in sunny Wangaratta or windy Warrnambool. We had now had 3 days of riding in temps of 40 degrees, with some guys doing a massive stint to regroup, and proceeded by the same in Alice where we had bivouacked. Oh, and the Gunbarrel and Steep point before that weren’t real easy.
Brad had some thoughts on the track and the heat as well. “Often as first bloke out the road if there is a dodgy section and we are thumping along, you are the first bloke to find it. From my experience and the experience of blokes like my son Chris, if in doubt, rev it out. The whoops caught me as well: I hit one, it launched me out, and then I got the next one, launched again, and then launched again. I was lucky to land on top of the last one. I have never had an issue with concentration before in my years of riding and racing bikes and being on the ball, but this time with the heat and the sweat running out of my helmet and dripping on to my tank bag I was finding it hard to concentrate”.
At lunchtime at a spot called ‘Lone Gum’ (there is one sizeable tree there that is actually a Coolabah Tree) the riders looked shot. The outside temp gauge on Max was on 43, and it shot up to 46 after lunch, staying there until we camped. We managed to squeeze out about 130 kms for the day, with the riders calling it a day near the junction of the Rig Road and Knolls Track, an area called Poolawanna. Many of the isolated features and tracks of the Simpson are named by or after oil exploration companies from the 1950’s, e.g. French Line is named after the French Oil Company. At this point in the id afternoon, we reached our nadir. The riders were dehydrated, fatigued, completely washed out. The support team fatigued as well through lack of sleep and the constant buffeting and bashing around in the vehicles. The riders had two separate groups, three on a small clay pan sheltering under a tarp tied between two bikes. The other three were the next dune across, again sheltering under a tarp, overlooking a salt lake. The cars rolled in and we brought the groups together near the salt lake to recover.
The bike riders had been consuming massive amounts of fluids: water, hydrolyte, soft drink. Rohman drank three litres of water on this day before lunch. As Dr Joc describes it, drinking can be a very inefficient way of re-hydrating. A fair bit of it just goes into your body and systems but not your blood stream where the fluid is really needed. Carl was looking particularly shattered as we gathered to discuss the day. He had been taking in lots of fluid but the holes in the swiss cheese lined up and the effect of multiple days and nights of high temperatures, little sleep, the fall and bump on the head, the effort of riding and also his position of leadership and decision making in the team, starting 21 days ago with our trip across the Nullarbor to Perth to start, had culminated in him hitting the bottom, suffering a headache and feeling pretty tired and lifeless. The great thing for us is of course we have a fantastic guy in Joc O’Connor, a paramedic, on hand to help us with these issues. Doctor Joc, with the assistance of Nurse Brad, was able to set Carl up comfortably and help him with building up his fluids in a manner to set him up to recover overnight.
With Carl not at his best it can be a sad and lifeless camp as he is our spiritual leader. We ran a fines session and Ohso passed the Anything But Average Award on to Stevie Larke for his tremendous courage in continuing on with us and still being handy even with one arm. There was not much mucking about as the sun set and darkness came under a clouded sky in an atmosphere heavy with heat. We were down on one knee, our leader was suffering. Would we go fully down tomorrow or would we get up? The dawn would lead us towards our destiny.
We are all getting hot, dry, tired and dirty. This is anything but average.
Today we had a big plan to push further into the Simpson Desert along the WAA Line. The plan was for the bikes to get away early, real early, and once they had done their distance stop in a temporary hoochie. Hopefully before the day really heated up, they would hole up at a nice camp spot and wait for the support team to come along. The bikes had been skipping along quite well but the cars were only averaging around 25kms an hour. Yesterday we had used the ‘catch-up’ method and it wasn’t that great, forcing the riders to sit around waiting for the cars and to run late in the day in heavy heat.
And so the camp was up really early, mostly the bike guys, and ready to go. After a couple of test runs in the dawn light they headed off, leaving the road crew to finish packing up and push off after them. As the road crew finished off the packing up, they thought that they heard a bike. Nah, couldn’t be, they had gone a while ago. Hang on, there it was again. Sure enough, shortly after the initial noise, Carl swung back into the camp, slowly followed by the rest of the crew. A call had been made. Their brief experience on the WAA line was tough enough for bikes and would definitely be too tough for the cars with the trailers. We would go back a little and head down the Rig Road. It turned out to be a good call. The forecast that we could recall had the heat easing off today, relatively speaking. It was not to be.
Early on the bikes were fine, even waiting to film the cars a time or two before pressing on. The three cars and two trailers battled on in slow-ish conditions. The initial southward track ran between the swales and was ok, tending to corrugated. When we swung to the east to traverse across the dunes we slowed a bit more. Mostly we were ok with the occasional couple of goes at a dune. Again Big Scotty pulled off a masterful display of backing a heavy trailer back down a sand dune to slip the big Troopy into low 4 and power up the soft, sandy dune.
From a bike perspective it was as hard as it gets, even harder. As Robdog McNally describes it ”You start perspiring from the moment you put on your protective bike gear; you know from that point forward that you were going to lose a lot of fluid for the day”. Some did a dynamic risk assessment and decided that the risk of dehydration was greater than the risk of falling off and the control they introduced was to just wear light cowboy-style outdoor shirts and no protective gear. Rob continues: “From the moment of starting the motorbike instead of having sections where you can rest a bit, sit down, catch your breath, you were constantly up on the pegs, working to control the bike, concentrating hard on picking the right line in the soft sand, being physically and mentally drained. The bottom line was that we had already had a couple of days of this and we had days to go”.
Overnight rehabilitation and recovery was very difficult, if not impossible, due to the high overnight heat. Carl recalls some of the difficulties: “Rob and I were lagging behind the other guys and so we didn’t get fresh sand. It’s easier if you are the first bike out on virgin sand; we had to cut our way and pick our way through the tracks of the previous bikes. A lot of the time I would go up the middle of the dune which was softer but un-broken. Carl describes his dune technique: “I would be in second or third gear, standing up on the pegs manoeuvring my weight to either side to keep the bike in line. The bike tends to want to go its own way so you try and let it do that but keep it to the track. It’s a constant fight, there is no rest”. Track features called ‘whoops’ were also an issue. These are big scallops out of the track that were filled with sand. They are irregular and some were big enough to swallow a bike. The boys would be riding along and hit one of these, unsettling and fully compressing the suspension, rebounding them like a pogo stick. Sometimes these were continuous. On the WAA line that the guys tested, Carl hit a big one and was thrown into the side embankment of the track coming to a dead stop. When returning from WAA early in the day Rob took a fall. The dunes look like a wave in cross section, with the peaks and crests curling over, travelling towards the west. Rob went up pretty hard as it was a 30 metre high dune; he needed a lot of momentum. It’s very hard to judge and he had a little bit too much on and overcooked it at the top. As you came off the crest the bike became airborne, assumed a nose down attitude and crashed back down on the track with Rob under the bike, twisting and jamming his ankle and wrist under the bike. Tough bastard that he is he only cried for a second (it was most likely sweat running into his eyes). The other riders were hard on his heels and he was lying in the middle of the track. With help from Brock to right the bike he kept on moving.
It was a day where we had to keep on moving; as Brock said “It was hot.” The mechanical genius also took a tumble, twisting his knee under the bike. In three days we had four falls resulting in a bang to the head, a dislocated shoulder and soft tissue injuries. And these were only the major falls. There were many more soft and semi-soft landings. Even Joc fell over once or twice, dirtying his cowboy shirt. However the falls at this stage were the lesser of the evils. The heat was the thing that was cooking us. This kind of riding is hard enough in normal weather like in sunny Wangaratta or windy Warrnambool. We had now had 3 days of riding in temps of 40 degrees, with some guys doing a massive stint to regroup, and proceeded by the same in Alice where we had bivouacked. Oh, and the Gunbarrel and Steep point before that weren’t real easy.
Brad had some thoughts on the track and the heat as well. “Often as first bloke out the road if there is a dodgy section and we are thumping along, you are the first bloke to find it. From my experience and the experience of blokes like my son Chris, if in doubt, rev it out. The whoops caught me as well: I hit one, it launched me out, and then I got the next one, launched again, and then launched again. I was lucky to land on top of the last one. I have never had an issue with concentration before in my years of riding and racing bikes and being on the ball, but this time with the heat and the sweat running out of my helmet and dripping on to my tank bag I was finding it hard to concentrate”.
At lunchtime at a spot called ‘Lone Gum’ (there is one sizeable tree there that is actually a Coolabah Tree) the riders looked shot. The outside temp gauge on Max was on 43, and it shot up to 46 after lunch, staying there until we camped. We managed to squeeze out about 130 kms for the day, with the riders calling it a day near the junction of the Rig Road and Knolls Track, an area called Poolawanna. Many of the isolated features and tracks of the Simpson are named by or after oil exploration companies from the 1950’s, e.g. French Line is named after the French Oil Company. At this point in the id afternoon, we reached our nadir. The riders were dehydrated, fatigued, completely washed out. The support team fatigued as well through lack of sleep and the constant buffeting and bashing around in the vehicles. The riders had two separate groups, three on a small clay pan sheltering under a tarp tied between two bikes. The other three were the next dune across, again sheltering under a tarp, overlooking a salt lake. The cars rolled in and we brought the groups together near the salt lake to recover.
The bike riders had been consuming massive amounts of fluids: water, hydrolyte, soft drink. Rohman drank three litres of water on this day before lunch. As Dr Joc describes it, drinking can be a very inefficient way of re-hydrating. A fair bit of it just goes into your body and systems but not your blood stream where the fluid is really needed. Carl was looking particularly shattered as we gathered to discuss the day. He had been taking in lots of fluid but the holes in the swiss cheese lined up and the effect of multiple days and nights of high temperatures, little sleep, the fall and bump on the head, the effort of riding and also his position of leadership and decision making in the team, starting 21 days ago with our trip across the Nullarbor to Perth to start, had culminated in him hitting the bottom, suffering a headache and feeling pretty tired and lifeless. The great thing for us is of course we have a fantastic guy in Joc O’Connor, a paramedic, on hand to help us with these issues. Doctor Joc, with the assistance of Nurse Brad, was able to set Carl up comfortably and help him with building up his fluids in a manner to set him up to recover overnight.
With Carl not at his best it can be a sad and lifeless camp as he is our spiritual leader. We ran a fines session and Ohso passed the Anything But Average Award on to Stevie Larke for his tremendous courage in continuing on with us and still being handy even with one arm. There was not much mucking about as the sun set and darkness came under a clouded sky in an atmosphere heavy with heat. We were down on one knee, our leader was suffering. Would we go fully down tomorrow or would we get up? The dawn would lead us towards our destiny.
