I think my main feeling on waking up for the second time, in a tent I had carried to a camp site by sailing boat, through sometimes adverse conditions, was relief. This was firstly due to the fact that I had certainly slept better than I had on the first night, that this in turn meant I would be safe to drive back to Sydney later that day, and finally that the plan was to drive back to Sydney later that day. Don’t get me wrong — this was not an outright recoiling from the dinghy cruising lifestyle, but a prudent response to the prospect of even worse weather, and the rapidly diminishing number of undamaged fingers I could use to pack up camp, sail boats and drive cars with.

The tent, ground sheet and dry bag setup had made it through the wet night with flying colours, and my plan of weighing down the camp chair with the water container so that it didn’t blow away seemed to have worked, as the chair was still there. I have failed to mention up to this point that I had bought two quick–drying camping towels at Ray’s Outdoors, with the idea that one would be dry–ish, and the other wet. Through poor towel logistics, I had managed to leave each of them on the camp chair during a period of rain, so they were now both sopping wet. I spread them and the tent fly on some nearby low bushes to try and dry them out, as I knew they would not be aired until I was back in Sydney. I repeated the previous day’s porridge and fruit salad breakfast, and made a coffee that I forgot to drink until it was quite cool. I remember wondering if I really needed a kettle as well as a folding–handle saucepan. If I boiled water in the saucepan and poured it into the mug with the coffee powder in it, I could then add oats to the remaining water, and have one less thing to manoeuvre into the forward hatch with my long suffering fingers. I can see the attraction of a kettle afloat, with reduced chances of a lap full of boiling water being delivered all at once by a tipping saucepan, but on land it might work.

Michael and Don had decided that they were also going home today, but not before a Shackleton’s furthest south–style expedition to Mungo Brush, on the southern shores of the Bombah Broadwater (best said in a Sean Connery voice), the last expanse of water before the Myall River, which drains the whole lake system to Port Stephens, and the Tasman Sea beyond. This would involve a glorious broad reach all the way there, and a more difficult return, but it seemed the natural and right thing to do. Having been thwarted in our attempt to reach the northern extent of the lakes at Neranie the previous day, like gas molecules bouncing around in Boyle’s box, it was our sworn duty as sailing explorers to poke into the furthest extents of our sailing grounds, lest we break the laws of thermodynamics.

Michael was rightly concerned that our launch ramp at Korsman’s was a lee shore in today’s conditions, and sketched a plan in which we would arrive at the ramp at half hour intervals, so that there would not be a pile of boats being blown onto the shore and each other, tangling their rigging in the overhanging tree branches while we raced to get our trailers. At the same time it was acknowledged that I was going to head back, at whatever time I felt I needed to meet my schedule. I called my wife to let her know I was coming back today, and was quickly tasked with taking my youngest daughter to evening netball. Planning backwards from that constraint, I decided I needed to get the boat onto the trailer at around one in the afternoon.

I was slow to pack up camp that morning, partly because I was hoping the fly and towels might dry out a bit more before I packed them, partly because everything I did hurt my hands, and partly due to a last minute nature break at the facility–free campground. This time I was the one still on the shore as the others headed out into the lake and picked up the wind. Knowing that I did not have to camp again that night, a certain weight lifted from me as I considered the ground I would have to make up to catch them. For our last sail together, perhaps I should let them see Harry in full fettle with a glorious un–reefed mainsail? In retrospect it is obvious that I had not placed my tent far enough away from Don’s, and that over the previous two days I had been incubating some virus I had picked up from him. Luckily I had this season’s flu vaccine, which is probably the only thing that stopped me setting the tent fly and towels as stunsails on the ends of my yards, but, as it was, this micro–DON sailor would measure the last morning of his odyssey if not in DONS, then at least in milli–DONs.

While still on the beach I shook out my reefs, glad for my finger’s sake that I had chosen a larger and softer braided line for my pennants. My slab reefing setup hasn’t quite been perfected, the reefing line is not long enough to leave the hooks in the top reef cringles when the sail is full, and needed some coaxing through the blocks on the boom to release its grip on the sail. I swung on the halyard and raised the freed sail as high as it would go, going easy on the downhaul, because I could see from the other boats that the first course across Two Mile lake to Myall Shores and the car ferry was a very broad reach. Pushing off, once again the first hundred or so metres of water marked the change from almost calm conditions at the shore, to a fresh breeze out on the lake, which was enough with my restored sail area and longer hull to start closing the distance with the others. After two days of sailing fully reefed, it was all a bit of an anticlimax, an easy sail between a tree–lined bay to port and well marked shallows to starboard, with the sun shining on the water through a gap in the clouds.

When I caught up with the others just west of the car ferry, their sails were lowered, Michael rowing towards the car ferry crossing, and Don following at a distance under motor. I wasn’t quite sure what the plan was, so I followed Don past the car ferry at rest on the western bank, and around to a sheltered beach on the northeastern shore of the Bombah Broadwater, where he had pulled up onto the sand. I lowered my sail and followed him into the shallows within speaking range, but he said he was continuing on. I then noticed that Michael was under sail again, and well on his way out into the Broadwater. I raised my sail, adding a little more downhaul tension as I considered the wide expanse of water to the south, and spilled wind waiting for Don to to join me. The protective shore fell away to the north and we took up an echelon formation maybe ten to twenty metres apart, where we could admire the other boat, when we weren’t otherwise occupied with the effects of the increasing wind and waves. The Muffin was coping well with the conditions, and for a racing dinghy seemed to be keeping Don reasonably dry. The red mirror jib and gunter main were so full they looked like a parachute behind a drag car, and despite my waterline length and sail area we seemed evenly matched for speed. I took a few good looks back at the shore and the hills behind to memorise the position of the passage to Two Mile lake before it merged into the rest of the shoreline.

The conditions were not dissimilar to the previous day’s, but the speed of the broad reach and perhaps the reassuring proximity of the other boat seemed to make this journey across the Broadwater less fraught and more exhilarating, despite my lack of reefs. The lee rail was still near the waterline but with the speed comes a deep hull–length wave that overwhelms any smaller waves that would try to take advantage of the reduced freeboard to slosh aboard. About half–way across Don had tried shouting something to me, and having no idea what he was saying I nodded, smiled and did all the other things you do to be polite in such a situation. I was dealing with an increasing amount of weather helm in the large gusts that rolled across the lake,  less sudden in their onset but relentless once present, more cannon balls than bullets. What Don had been trying to tell me became apparent in one of these a minute or so later when the weather helm became irresistible and the boat headed up so quickly that the centrifugal force had me doubled forward over the centreboard case  waiting for the boat to trip over its lee gunwale and swamp, as had happened on several other boats in my younger days.

By the way, the Harry Henry has never capsized. The closest it ever came to disaster was again on Smith’s Lake nearby to the north, when I was sailing with a friend who professed sailing experience and wanted to tend the mainsheet. Shortly thereafter we were caught beam on in a squall (for a small body of water, Smith’s Lake has more than its fair share of weird weather). I remember the boat blowing sideways under a full press of canvas scooping up water like the bucket of a bulldozer, with him on his back on the lee gunwale using the mainsheet to hold himself up, and me screaming “Let it go!” repeatedly like a death–metal Queen Elsa. As soon as he did, the boat popped straight up. With that important addition to his sailing experience my friend returned the mainsheet to me without complaint and got busy bailing a considerable amount of water out of the bilge. I’ve meant to set up a practice capsize in sheltered waters several times over the years, but I’ve never got around to it.

In this case, the Ness Boat came to a stop head to (blasting) wind in the choppy waters, and I quickly realised that Don had been trying to tell me that the rudder had floated up (I have been meaning to do something about my rudder downhaul line/cleat combination for years) causing my weather helm. With a quick pull on the downhaul and a glare at the cleat, I bore away onto our original course, assisted by briefly back–winding the mainsail with some hand pressure on the end of the boom. Eventually the shoreline to port closed with our course, and we could see Michael’s boat pulled up on a beach, with a very established looking campsite complete with motorhomes and paved roads behind it. As before in these lakes, the water conditions magically dialled back towards calm winds and flat glassy clear water as we approached, even though this was not a weather shore. I nosed into the beach and assayed the Mungo Brush camp ground. The vegetation at the north end of the beach was quite different to the trip so far, with a dense rainforest canopy including palm trees. Michael pointed out a dingo with bright orange hair trotting like a boss across a nearby lawn, and a couple from the campsite came down to the beach to admire our boats.

This was a morning tea stop for Michael and Don, but aware of the time I knew I had to turn around, and head back to Korsman’s if I wanted to keep to my schedule. Rooting around in the narrow part of my starboard aft “L” compartment, I found my supply of “R” signal flags that I bought as gifts for the skippers of boats who join me on RAID–like activities, and presented one each to Michael and Don, with thanks for the invitation and their company. Handily “R” is the only letter in the International Code of Signals that has no meaning when used on its own. I propose we fix that and assign the Kenneth Grahame–esque meaning “I am Messing About in a Boat — Remain Clear” so that we can recognise each–other on the world’s waterways.

Thinking of the conditions I had just experienced on the Broadwater, and that this would be a windward leg, I prepared for Gentleman Mode, and in a moment of gallows humour suggested to Michael that when they traced my path later that day, they keep an eye out for an overturned blue hull. Pushing off I cranked up the Tohatsu, waved farewell to Michael, Don and the camping couple, and pointed my stem at the peaks I had memorised to mark the passage to Two Mile Lake (checking just now on Google Earth, these are on the northeast shore of Boolambayte Lake above the road to Violet Hill).  The conditions rapidly deteriorated. This time I was travelling into the teeth of the wind, which itself was less of a concern with my mainsail lashed on the floorboards, but the short high chop that built up with (checks Google Earth again) less than three kilometres of fetch was ridiculous. In the Broadwater proper every fifth wave or so would pitch the Tohatsu up out of the water causing the motor to race and the boat to slow down, accompanied with a flying lap–full of spray. If it got any worse I worried that it might take so long to cross the Broadwater that I’d run out of fuel and I’d need to run away to the western shore under sail, because I would have great difficulty leaning out to refuel the motor in the rapidly pitching boat, and rowing would be futile. After a few minutes of this, I shifted my seating position from the little motorbike seat on the rear of the centreboard case, to the rear buoyancy tanks to sink the propeller a few centimetres lower in the water. This seemed to solve both the motor and the spray problem, although the front of the boat was spending so much time in the air I suspected it would look like one continuous wheelie from the shore.  For a longer term solution I should really adjust the shape of the outboard bracket, which was designed for the British Seagull and should be a little smaller and lower for the current motor.

Slowly I closed with the marker posts leading to the passage, and details of the northern shore became distinct. The chop faded away although the wind remained, and even allowing for relative motion was certainly much stronger than it had been when we passed through earlier. I rounded the last marker into the narrow channel, and crossed the ferry which again was stationary on the west bank — my epic crossing of the Bombah Broadwater having taken about half an hour. I exchanged a friendly wave with a fisherman on the eastern shore, and checked my fuel level through the transparent side of the exposed fuel tank. I had painted the fuel tank black, and masked a strip on the boat side of the tank so that I could see the level, but as it turned out the paint was not fuel–proof, and had started to slough off the tank anyway, making my masking unnecessary. I had expected to almost be out of fuel, and was surprised to see about two thirds remaining, so I continued, rounding a reedy promontory (reeds!) for a final dash along the channel markers of Two Mile Lake. It was windy but the chop was small. Nearing the previous night’s campsite, I turned westward towards Korsman’s, the engine picking up speed as the mizzen enjoyed a last beam reach and helped to push me on towards the stretch of water we had started on two days earlier.

Approaching the ramp my thoughts turned towards recovering the boat onto the trailer, and Michael’s concerns from the morning. I have a healthy respect for the perils of a lee shore —  a year previously I had held the Ness Boat bucking in a two metre surf at Abrahams’ Bosom beach on the South Coast, arranging a crew to help get it back on a trailer. On another occasion I had sat through my sister’s birthday lunch at Doyle’s in sopping wet casual clothes, with my daughters in hysterics because my dear mother had insisted that my family arrive in Harry Henry, (some much loved Henry cousins were attending from interstate) and with a big swell running into Watson’s Bay that day, my only option was to drop everyone on the beach, anchor off and swim ashore.

With all this in mind, I motored up to a guest mooring in the shelter of Professor’s cove opposite the ramp, shut down the engine and proceeded to unship the masts, which is a reasonably straight forward thing to do in a boat with no standing rigging. The boat gets a little more twitchy with the mast down, and stepping around it once it’s in the boat takes a bit of Twister–like planning, but five minutes later I was able to unmoor and sedately motor over to the ramp, where I cut the outboard and glided into a tiny cove under the she–oaks, a few metres to the south of the ramp. I walked through the now deserted campsite to the trailer parking area, and was relieved to find the car and trailer there. Settling into the driver’s seat with arrays of technological bling in front of me was surprisingly surreal, and I mused on why this was so on my way back to the ramp. Getting the boat back on to the trailer I discovered that between the cove and the ramp there is an area of very soft mud just before the rocks that make up the ramp, so consider yourself warned. Packing up the boat was slow with my damaged fingers. I had huge quantities of fresh water left over in my containers, so after removing the bung from the boat I rinsed the sails and interior with their contents. I threw all my dry bags in the back of the Forester, secured everything that moved, and piled a supply of snacks on the passenger seat. Eventually it was done, so I took a moment to take in the wind rushing through the leaves overhead, the stretch of water at the end of the ramp, put on my 21st century face and got into the car.

When I got back to Bulahdelah, I was not quite ready for the Pacific Highway, so I took a turn down the hill to the Myall River to check out the houseboat hire business, another place I had spent my entire life going past, but never visiting. To reassure myself that this wasn’t an immediate betrayal of the sailing–camping ethos, I told myself that this would only be used as a support vessel for a future RAID mission, an idea that had briefly been discussed with Michael and Don. I arrived at the same time as a suburban couple, and soon afterwards the crusty master mariner owner of the business introduced himself, and offered a tour of the boats. They were nice boats as houseboats go, (I do wish you could still hire cabin sail boats on the lakes) but my main concern was how they would go in the sorts of conditions I had just experienced. This line of questioning encouraged the master mariner, who started talking about the draft suitable for the Myall Lakes (0.5m), the thickness of the fibreglass hull (50mm), the unbelievably stupid things some of the hirers had done, (ask me at the pub) and the apocalyptic survival conditions he had sailed the houseboats through on an improbable number of occasions. I would like to apologise to that couple, who probably started as potential hirers, but I think were increasingly appalled, and I would not be surprised if their holiday plans changed to an extended stay at Lightning Ridge, or some other location a long way from any large bodies of water. After that I drove back to Sydney with a stop for fuel and the F1 cafe at Warnervale services, Sydney traffic, and a windy but entertaining night netball game, which my daughter’s team won convincingly. I got a text message from Michael saying they had made the ramp at around five in the afternoon. They had started beating across the Broadwater, but so much water was coming aboard that they swapped to motors. The following day was spent drying and airing, doing a wash, and revising my dream boat plans from my home office sofa.

One day there will be a shallow draft trailerable motor sailer, with a cozy Halvorsen–like back deck for reading books in an anchorage with my wife, (that’s her sort of sailing) but, in the meantime, I have finished Roger Barnes’ book, (excellent and somewhat less terrifying than Margaret Dye’s) and have a list of improvements to try on Harry. Following the example of Michael and Don, I’ve been wondering just how much of a boat you really need to do this, as something that didn’t need a launching ramp would be a great relief around Sydney, where ramp rage is a leading cause of sailing stress. For the purposes of further experiment, I have a few of Michael Storer’s smaller boat plans, Iain Oughtred’s Auk plans and a pile of Gaboon plywood in the workshop.

This time, I won’t wait almost a quarter of a century to take whatever comes out of the workshop camping. As Michael said in his galvanising Facebook invitation for the trip: “Go small, go simple, go now”. I did.

Video By Michael Smith

I woke up — success! At least I had been able to sleep and have one or two odd dreams that didn’t involve being in a tent. It was still dark, but the birds started to stir and, as soon as it was light, I got dressed and set about getting breakfast: porridge with fruit salad and another coffee sachet. Michael and I went off with some money to try and find the deposit box for our camping fees, but it wasn’t where Michael had seen it before. I had read a Google review for the Neranie camp site (our next destination at the head of the main lake) that suggested that Rangers came around to collect fees, so we supposed that they might turn up, but we didn’t see one while we were there. The weather had not improved. In fact, the forecast said that the strong winds were starting earlier than expected. We discussed trying to sort out Don’s rig but eventually decided that Don would stay at Shelly Beach while Michael and I would try to head on to Neranie. If the conditions were not good we would come back and we would all head downwind to find a spot on one of the smaller lakes.

Food and cooking equipment went back through the Tupperware–unfriendly forward hatch, and I basically reversed the previous evening’s camp setup process, with the modification of leaving the wet tent fly of the Nighthawk Black Angel II Ubertent out of the dry bag. Michael and I pushed out into the suspiciously calm water, waved farewell to Don and set out north towards Long Point, behind which the rest of the main lake waited.

Neranie is the northernmost point of Myall Lake. I actually went to school for a few months (long, true story, involving my not meeting Dr Who actor, Tom Baker) at Bungwahl Public School, only a few hundred metres from Neranie, but at the time Neranie was a private water–ski park, and so my family used to drive past it on the way to Seal Rocks without ever seeing the lake from the road. It is now part of the Myall Lakes National Park and Michael (and incidentally my cousin originally from Bungwahl who I saw earlier today) assured me it is a wonderful place. With the wind from that direction it would be a safe anchorage, if we could get there.

As before the wind came back a hundred metres or so from the shore, and gradually built in intensity. Within a few minutes it was back to the conditions of the previous afternoon (this was at about nine am) but, as we approached the point, the chop continued to build. Bullets (bursts of intense wind) started to hit the boat, so that with the mainsheet loose and the fully reefed sail flat, weathercocked and humming, the boat still heeled over so that the lee gunwale was within inches of the water, despite my hiking out. Michael was father out and I have no idea how he remained upright with that huge mast. I was starting to make the sort of “hrmming” noises I tend to make when I am not enjoying myself, or in fact am slightly scared.

My tiller extension was starting to work loose again so at one point between gusts I rounded up, sheeted in my mizzen and set to re–tying the lashing that connected it to the tiller. When I finished I looked for Michael and saw him reaching back towards the camp site we had left. I knew he was very keen to make it to Neranie and worried for a moment that he had taken my rounding up as a sign that I was heading back, which I hadn’t intended, but actually was very relieved to do. I bore away to follow him and continued to have a scary time for a few minutes, until I reached the more sheltered conditions in the lee of Long Point. As it turned out, Michael with his decades of experience sailing the lake, had decided to head back himself, so I’m glad it was a mutual decision. Looking at the topographic map now, I notice that there is a low saddle in the hill behind Long Point Bay, which may have been funnelling those concentrated bullets of wind down at us on the water. We closed with the camp, surprising Don who had settled in expecting to spend another day and night there, so Michael set up for tea while Don packed up camp in preparation for a downwind run to our lunch site the previous day, where I could look for my EPIRB.

The designer in his native habitat

My boat is a Ness Boat, one of the earlier Scottish whaleboat–inspired beach boat designs of the famous wooden boat designer Iain Oughtred, a longtime resident of Skye in Scotland, but native to my own hometown of Sydney. Robert Ayliffe, founder of Duck Flat Wooden Boats, encouraged me to consider the design when I asked about a boat suitable for beach camping. The sloping forefoot was suitable for beaching on unknown shores. It was a sea-kindly shape designed to carry terrified men and whale blubber around the North Sea, and the yawl rig looked suitable for stringing up a ridge pole for a tent between the masts. It was a lot of boat for a first project, but Robert’s “bite off more than you can chew, then chew like crazy” motto got me over the hump. I studied the plans, bought tools, went to woodworking classes to learn how to sharpen said tools, then set off with an empty boat trailer and my mother on new year’s day 1996 for one of Duck Flat’s boat building summer schools in South Australia, both of us still reeling from the funeral of my grandmother the previous day.

Build Montage Part One

The summer school was wonderful therapy and we departed a fortnight later with a recognisable hull on a building frame on a trailer, towed by my mighty 1.3 litre Holden (really Suzuki) Barina. We made it back to Sydney before the boat, which was retrieved on a separate, Australia Day weekend, trip to Naranderra with my then new girlfriend now wife, as that’s where the NRMA had been putting a new axle and wheel on the trailer, the previous wheel having departed at speed on the original return trip.

Build Montage Part Two

The boat followed various house moves, marriage and the birth of our two daughters, who spent their formative years believing it to be a thing that sat in the carport for them to recline in while they ate their lunch. The nob on the end of the tiller was an off-cut I retrieved from a fishing trawler being built in a yard at Macduff Scotland on a holiday. Finally it was launched into the waters of Hen and Chicken Bay in 2004, named Harry Henry for my grandfather, whose family originally hailed from Macduff.

Many years later I was reading Nic Compton’s beautiful coffee table book biography of Iain Oughtred. At one point Iain talks about the rig choices of the beach boats and says that after drawing yawl rigs like mine for many years he had an epiphany in a sloop rigged beach boat when he realised it handled perfectly well when stopped head to wind to put in a reef, something that had always been considered an advantage of the mizzen sail–equipped yawl rig. He went on to say that he now prefers the sloop–rigged boats.

I had certainly taken advantage of the mizzen–as–park–brake to fix my tiller extension twice in the past day, but I have perfected another mizzen–only technique that had possibly not occurred to an uber–competent sailor such as Iain (artistic license here: it is an article of faith that Iain is omniscient in all things boat–related). It is, in fact, a technique only a card–carrying member of the live coward’s club such as I would consider leveraging in polite sailing company: behold, “Gentleman Mode”.

I told Michael and Don that I’d head off early because they’d probably catch up with me. I then lashed my mainsail firmly in the bottom of the boat, loosened the snotter on the mizzen sail to give it a bit of downwind power, put the outboard down ready for action and pushed off again into the calm water over the beautiful sandy shallows of Shelly Beach. I barely had any way on the boat, and almost drifted into some trees off where the other boats were pulled up, before a puff of wind got me moving away from the land. Again, as I moved away from the land, the wind and waves built up, but this time all I had in its way was my mizzen: a baby windsurfer sail in the back of the boat. Within minutes I was at full hull speed (double enders don’t plane) with a train of waves running off either side in my wake, completely in control and running back down towards the passage leading to Violet Hill. Normally, I’m a little uncomfortable running because of the danger of an unexpected gybe, but if the mizzen gybes, all that happens is that there’s a muffled thump, and I look around to see if the sheet needs to be trimmed. In heavy weather downwind it’s like having a very powerful, silent outboard, except that it emits a kind of mental radiation that makes you feel scandalously smug.

Gentleman Mode as viewed through a Smug–O–Scope

I was already a kilometre or so out when Michael and Don launched. I was rather concerned for Don, as he was going to be sailing downwind and the fullness of his sail meant he was going to have a lot of power to deal with. They were clearly gaining on me but only got into clear visual range as we approached the mouth of the passage. Michael had warned me not to cut the eastern channel marker as it really did get shallow in there. I kept looking around to count the sails, in case Don disappeared and I had to start the motor to head back and effect a rescue. At some point he was going to have to gybe to make the channel and in those conditions I wasn’t sure the Muffin would survive. In the event, I wasn’t looking when he gybed, and he pulled it off with aplomb. In his honour I think we should introduce a unit of measure for RAID ballsiness: gybing a hybrid sailing dinghy assembled on the ramp the day before, that only goes downwind in over twenty–five knots of wind and a steep chop, carrying your camping gear and outboard while suffering from some form of influenza = 1 DON. If you want to know what constitutes a BARNES (ten DONS) or a DYE (one hundred DONS) just read their books…

With some more attention to the mizzen sheet I can reach in Gentleman Mode, so I aimed for each channel marker, waited to see its colour, and passed on the correct side, although coming off the huge lake into the narrow passage you have to remind yourself that you’re still heading towards the sea, not away from it. As we moved into the shelter of Violet Hill, the mizzen was no longer enough, and the other two boats passed me, with their rigs able to keep them moving with the puffs that made it past the hill. I knew that when we came out of the wind–shadow we would be back in the wind and, as I was still a bit loathe to repeat my experience earlier that morning, I started the outboard.

I originally had a British Seagull motor which, despite being an old thing with barely a thread or two holding the flywheel on the crankshaft, absolutely looked the part for a wannabee work boat. Eventually I bought a Tohatsu, which is a great motor, but looked far too modern. Recently, for the first time, it had experienced starting problems, so the previous Sunday I had taken off the covers, replaced the spark plug and checked the carburettor. I realised that, without the covers, the Tohatsu looked like a black Seagull, with the advantage that I could visually see the fuel level and whether or not the carburettor was flooded, so I decided to leave the covers off.

Now with the others sailing ahead I thought I’d give the newly retro–look outboard a good run, so I continued in Gentleman Mode past Violet Hill. I wasn’t quite paying attention to where the others were heading and realised that I was up the bay to the west, past the entrance to Boolambayte Creek, so I corrected my course and followed the others into the creek, pulling up in the spot I had used the day before. We looked around the lunch tables and in the water (the EPIRB floats) but couldn’t see it anywhere. Later reviewing Michaels’ video of our arrival at the creek on the previous day I confirmed the EPIRB was no longer on my arm, so it must have gone overboard: maybe it got caught on the tiller during a tack. After the morning’s excitement I felt like something hot for lunch, so I put some two minute noodles together with a Continental cup–a–soup, and wound up with something so salty that it probably took a year off my life. I washed it down with a bottle of diet soft drink, which didn’t really help to get rid of the saltiness. Getting back into the boat, accustomed to the accomodating sandy bottom of my Shelly Beach mooring, I stepped off one of the afforementioned slippery tree roots and discovered there was nothing to stand on even a few centimetres into the creek. Luckily my embarrasing scrabble for purchase on the foredeck of my boat was obscured from the others by a screen of trees.

Heading out again, I nosed into the reeds on the windward side of the creek to raise sail, because I’d seen the others doing that the previous day, and it seemed a very Arthur Ransome thing to do, reeds being rare around the waterways of Sydney. I decided to put my main back up but in deference to the conditions I slid the downhaul back on the boom as a way to put more of the sail in front of the mast, because I’d noticed in the past that this made gybes a lot gentler. Off we set, the wind pushing us along the thin section of Boolambayte Lake where we had launched our boats the previous day. On the whole, I must have been having fun, because I had no regrets as we passed the launch ramp and headed on south towards the entrance of Two Mile Lake. However, rounding the point into the lake (Michael’s notes on the map say this is the best lake for prawns), the apparent wind picked up again and, to get to the new campsite on the eastern shore, I had to work to windward again.

There wasn’t enough fetch for a chop to build up but the wind was really hammering, occasionally as bad as the morning’s attempt on Neranie. It would have been okay, but I seemed to be tacking back and forth making very little progress towards the shore and getting frazzled by the gusts. I didn’t see how the others did it (I assume Don motored) but it took what seemed like ages to get up into the glassy sheltered water off the campsite. Again, learning more about the rig with these longer tacks I now suspect that sliding the downhaul back reduces the already low aspect ratio of the reefed sail (the yard lowers as the boom goes forward) to the point where it can barely work to windward. I’ll have to try sliding it a bit more forward the next time I’m working to windward and see if it makes any difference.

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Robin arrives frazzled at the second camp site

Frazzled Arrival Photos By Michael Smith

The campsite had a single beach just big enough for the three boats side by side, although my boat is a lot heavier and was not pulled up as far as the others. There were some small trees not much taller than our masts lining the shore. At the back of the beach there were a few low bushes with sandy paths on either side, and behind them were some campsites between some tall gum trees. This was a less established camp site than the last one, with no toilet and no grass. The ground was sand and tree bark with, as we quickly discovered, a disappointing amount of broken glass, particularly around the fireplace. As a child I had got my first stitches by stepping out of a canoe onto a broken beer bottle at Smiths Lake (the same beach where I had picked up the stick for my previous tiller extension) so it was a strictly shoes–on (or at least thongs, that’s flip–flops for you Cruising Dinghy Association people and jandals for your NZ equivalents) campsite for me.

I did a careful scan of the tree branches around the camp to see if any looked dodgy in case the wind came up in the night, but they seemed to be okay. Considering that there was a National Parks sign proclaiming this as a campsite, I supposed that the Rangers would have to give a cursory check of the trees every now and then, given the litigious nature of modern society. Putting those thoughts aside, I considered the ground where my Beverly Hills RoboCop Lethal Untouchable 3000 would be pitched, a reasonably flat bit of sand with a small anthill and large tunnel in the middle of it. I had spotted a few bull ants as I walked around, so I was particularly happy that I had the ground sheet with me, because it gave me a sand and ant free area to work on. This time the tent went up quickly, and I paid attention to the direction the fly guy ropes went so that there was a lot more tension in the head–to–toe direction to keep the fly off the inner tent. The other improvement on the previous night’s arrangements was to keep almost all of the dry bags outside the inner tent under the eaves of the fly for more room to sleep. I figured that they’re sealed and nothing is going to crawl into them, particularly if they don’t contain food. I found that I could use towels and yesterday’s shirt to brush the sand out of the tent and then off the groundsheet, so I wasn’t going to have a problem with a sandy sleeping bag.

Transfering the water, food and cooking equipment from the boat I realised that my programmer’s hands were not holding up very well to the sailing camping lifestyle. One of my nails was split and others were either bloody or sunburnt. Opening the hatch catches (my own design, a hardwood tongue held in place with rubber bands) was normally not a problem, but this time it was quite painful. I heated up a tin of soup and picked at other bits and pieces. When I returned the food to the boat I left my water container in the camp chair to save carrying it back up from the boat in the morning, and to hold the chair down in case the wind came up during the night.

Michael had checked the weather report, and with conditions looking like they were going to deteriorate even further overnight, reasoned that it might not be worth camping another night after this one. I was feeling like I had already learned a lot, and felt that I may need a day to recover and dry everything out when I got back to Sydney before going back to work. My daughter was also starting her HSC exams on Thursday and I thought it would be good to get back earlier, so that if anything alarming happened, it didn’t happen on the day before her exam. All this (and the state of my hands) considered, I said that I’d aim to get back on the trailer at lunchtime the following day. Michael and Don weren’t going to make up their minds just yet and would see what the weather was like in the morning.

Day Two Camp Site

This evening was more social, and discussions ranged from reverse–engineering land yachts and what to do when your farm produces more food than you can possibly eat, to whitewater rafting on the Nymbodia River — apparently where Don honed his high scoring DON abilities — and island properties. Michael told me about some of the historical research he’d done into Nelson Bay’s WWII defences and local Aboriginal dreamtime stories recorded by earlier settlers. He also showed Don and me a tiny “Flying Duck” orchid growing in the sand right there in the camp that looked like a wasp, and that reacted to touch by springing upside down to cover a real wasp trying to mate with it with its pollen.

This evening was more comfortable despite the weather, which got more emphatically wet. I was startled at first by the noise my newly taut fly made when large drops of rain concentrated by the branches overhead drummed on the fabric, but the mind is impressive in its ability to tune these things out and I didn’t need much of the news (I still had excellent mobile Internet here) to put me to sleep.

Thanks again to Mark Walker for the edit. Continue reading with Day Three.

I had set an early alarm, taken a shower, and hooked the already loaded boat to the car late on Saturday night after arriving home from my daughter’s birthday dinner, so there was little to do on Sunday morning but get dressed, leave the perfectly warm and dry house, and gingerly step across the newly laid and very soggy turf in our front yard to the waiting car.

There was plenty of rather wet rain, sock–like early morning overcast darkness and very little traffic, as I drove across the Harbour Bridge, which always seems to be a slightly magical and quite wrong thing to be doing when trailing a boat. For the first time in my life I missed the entrance to the Lane Cove tunnel and found myself on Epping Road, so I took the opportunity to stop at a deserted bus stop and secure something that was flapping in the wind and drizzle before I got to the freeway.

This turned out to take longer than expected due to a crash at Berowra which, according to many warning signs had closed said freeway, so I took the old Pacific Highway past the “Pie in the Sky” cafe (which I had completely forgotten about since the freeway was built), all the way to the north shore of the Hawkesbury River. My main game at this point was trying to pick the right adjective to describe the nature of the rain to my fellow RAIDers (who had driven down from Northern NSW with their boats the day before) when I arrived at the boat ramp, presumably quite late, in a few hours time. I decided on “teeming” over “driven” because the latter seems to have a more horizontal quality to it (discuss). It was certainly spectacular on the old Pacific Highway’s curling descent to the Hawkesbury, where the roadside embankment seemed to be one continuous, dreamlike and quite un-Australian waterfall.

The rain remained either teeming or torrential all the way to the Warnervale services where I donned my Bourke oilskins for the only time on the entire trip (I am sinfully proud of them for their Sydney–to–Hobart chic but I suspect I look a little like a pervert when I wear them with shorts because they’re long enough to cover them completely) and exchanged mumbled “nice day for it”–type pleasantries with a truckie, as I waded across the car park to Maccas. I had intended to go to the F1 cafe because their breakfasts are very satisfying, but there was a queue and I was running late. As I approached Hexham the weather and daylight improved rapidly, with a few hopeful glimpses of blue sky in the far distance, and the boat got a chance to dry out slightly as I made up the remaining distance to Bulahdelah and the Myall Lakes.

The road into the National Park followed the edge of a gum forest on the left and a series of water–logged paddocks bordering the Myall River on the right, all witnessed by the occasional huddle of cows and one or two black faced wallabies. I took the turn to Korsman’s camp ground, crawling along at slow speed behind the last few children left over from the school holidays, until they meandered off the road and shortly thereafter found myself at a launch ramp with two men, one dinghy and glints of sunlight on the water through the trees, about twenty minutes after the designated launch time of nine am.

The dinghy was Don’s, who declined to shake my hand because he was suffering from quite a bad cold. He was having some trouble setting his rig up, because, as it turned out, he had only bought the boat (a Puffin) on Gumtree the day before — sight unseen — and was now trying to marry an old Mirror rig he’d had lying around to it (does this make it a Muffin?). Given the amount of trepidation and planning I had put into getting ready for the trip (it had taken almost a quarter of a century from when I first built the boat for beach camping, to today when I finally got around to doing it), I don’t think I could quite keep the look of shock off my face, but he happily coughed and fiddled away at the boom and sail sagging into his cockpit, so I started rigging my boat.

Michael, the instigator of the trip and — quite literally — the man who drew the boating map of the Myall Lakes, had already launched his boat, which I couldn’t quite make out down on the edge of the water. It turned out to be a compact and beamy fibreglass dinghy with a towering mast and white mainsail which I think he said later came out of a land yacht. He was keen to go but was interested in my boat (I think he thought the mizzen was a bit complicated) and, speaking from experience, suggested a few things to check or secure as I set up.

The path down to the ramp had many overhanging she–oak branches, but none low enough to interfere with my masts. The launching ramp was made up of loose, fist sized gravel, and looked over a stretch of river maybe two hundred metres wide, bordered by reed banks. The wind was reasonably fresh and, being a professional coward, I sensibly reefed my mainsail down to its smallest possible size. There was a jetty with an aluminium ladder, sort of nailed onto its front face like a totem pole, which although I don’t think it would have taken any weight, was useful for spotting the launching ramp later on. Don took the painter of the Harry Henry (my boat, details to follow later) and secured it to the end of the jetty, while I drove the car back to the trailer parking spot at the other end of the campsite. When I got back, I managed to transfer to the boat off the jetty without falling in, start the motor and scoot out into the middle of the river, where I set the motor to idle, got my life jacket and EPIRB on, raised the sails, and finally stopped and secured the outboard.

Photo by Michael Smith

Right. After all the faffing about —I’m here. First impressions were that the wind wasn’t too scary at the moment, it wasn’t raining but it looked like a shower was quite possible, and I was very aware that every compartment of the boat (it had many, because beach camping) was crammed full of fuel, water and dry bags stuffed with food, clothes, tents and sleeping gear. At this point at the start of the trip, the pressure to get all this cargo safely to our first campsite weighed heavily on me. I could see Michael’s sail up the passage to windward, while Don was still in the process of launching, so I started sailing up and down trying to keep in sight of both of them. A few minutes later when Don launched, he seemed to be reaching back and forth between the launch ramp and the bay opposite but not coming upwind. I dropped down to see if he was okay, and indeed he was unable to get enough tension in his rig to work to windward. He had an outboard and insisted I go on, but I did hang back until I saw him motoring up towards me. 

I hadn’t seen where Michael had got to in the meantime, but I continued to work to windward in the slightly flukey winds in the lee of some taller ground. Eventually I realised that he had pulled up on the opposite bank and that Don had joined him there. I wasn’t in a rush to join them because I thought we were going on, but as it turned out, there was a necessary confab to discuss our upcoming lunch stop at Boolambayte Creek, and I was delaying things. With that sorted out we continued around the corner into the top of Boolambayte Lake, with Don towing Michael under motor and me following in their wake. 

A line of reeds coming out from the north shore marks the entrance to the creek. There are many overhanging branches so I cut my motor and went in behind Don and Michael under oar power. This was quite a fun challenge, as there were snags in the water and branches to get the mast around, and with a combination of quick oar work, craning of the neck and weight shifting to weave the mast Millennium Falcon–like through the overhanging branches, I was able to make it to the site of our lunch halt. I found one of those uniquely Myall Lake–ian mooring spots to pull up, where the bank is held up by tree roots (mainly paper bark in this creek)  that act as little slippery jetties next to the boat that, if you’re careful, give you access to the land. The ground was spongy like a modern children’s playground foam, and the trodden paths had knee–high sweeps of dense dark green grass (sassafras?) that curled, wave like, over the path from each side, and took some effort to push through. The lunch site had two concrete tables, and for the first time, I contemplated what to eat, and the logistics of getting food and cooking gear out of the hatches in the boat.

Photo by Michael Smith

The previous week I had taken the forward hatch of the boat — a “glove box” style opening in the bulkhead next to the mast — to the local IGA, so that I could buy some Tupperware to fit through the opening. I got some large boxes that fitted nicely, but at the last moment got some smaller boxes that had more compartments in them as well. I had two drawstring bags, and put one large and two small Tupperware containers in each bag. One bag was sweet, and one was savoury. The annoying thing was that the two smaller containers were slightly too large to fit through the hatch together, so I had to always take one of the small containers out of the bag before I could get it in or out of the hatch. I think I had some Saladas with chilli tuna and some diet soft drink for lunch. Over the course of the trip eating happened more quickly and less memorably than I expected, because every meal was top and tail–ed by a lot of logistics that I generally wanted to be over and done with.

Both Don and Michael had set up burners and made some warm food. Don was preparing his food separately from us to stay gluten free, and I became quite aware of how glutenous my Salada lunch was. A rain shower came through, and at some point  we realised that Michael’s boat was now drifting across the creek, which was a surprise given how sheltered it was in there (when reviewing this chapter, Michael gently pointed out that Don tied that knot). I ducked back to my boat and performed a reasonably competent rescue mission under oars, so hopefully some of the earlier delays and trails of glutenous crumbs were forgiven.

Michael was obviously so impressed by this that after lunch he asked me to tow him out of the creek under motor. I tied his painter (quite short) around my boom-kin and tried to get under way, but with no way on the boat I couldn’t steer with my rudder, and, with another boat on a short painter tied to my stern, I found that no amount of turning the outboard could direct either boat. The whole assembly accelerated towards some snags, and before I could snap a mast or break a partner (things which have happened before) I hit the kill switch on the motor, getting away with a mild creak of protest from the partner as the mast contacted some branches and it all came to a stop. Michael agreed that it would be a bit less stressful to get out of the creek without the motor. I think this is also the point that Don, following behind, managed to chew up a bit of the Muffin’s rudder with his propeller, so this probably counts as the high water mark for outboard antics over the course of the trip.

Back out in the fresh winds at the top of Lake Boolambayte we raised sail and set out for Violet Hill. I fell behind while fixing up my tiller extension, which was coming loose, but caught up with the others in the lee of Violet Hill, which cast a huge wind shadow over the eastern parts of the lake. Given how windy it was everywhere else, I think this would be a good place to ride out really bad weather as there is a substantial island that also protects it from the south. We cranked up the motors again with Don towing Michael. I recently added a scarf into my tiller to lengthen it and replaced an old stick I’d picked up to use as a tiller extension (just a few kilometres north at Smiths Lake many years ago) with a carbon–fibre tail–boom from a crashed drone. It’s all actually about 50mm too long now (when I tack I can’t quite fit it behind me and it has to go over my head) but one of the nice things it lets me do is stand up in light conditions or under outboard power, a welcome relief from sitting down for hours at a time. From this standing position it’s a bit ungainly to duck back and adjust the engine speed, so every now and then, when I got a bit close to the rest of the convoy, I’d zig or zag to drop back to a comfortable distance.

We passed trains of ducks, black swans, Violet Hill launch ramp and the camp ground, which despite spending almost all my childhood holidays nearby I’d never visited. We also saw the only other sailboat of the trip at this point, a large fibreglass trailer sailer with a cabin (slight envy) that was motoring in the same direction as us, towards the south end of the big lake.

Not far past Violet Hill the passage sweeps around to the left, bringing the main lake into view. The wind was coming straight down the lake with extreme (20+ knots) prejudice and lines of foam stretching into the distance upwind clearly indicated the wind direction. Michael was raising his sails while Don continued to motor to windward, so I cut the motor and raised the main, still with the deepest available reef and following Michael Storer’s (a boat designer friend and balanced lug rig expert) advice about heavy weather sailing, possibly the most severe application of six–part–purchase downhaul I’ve ever applied to my main. Our first few tacks kept us clear of the shallows on either side of the channel markers and eventually I settled on a long starboard tack across the foot of the lake towards an island which appeared to not be that far away. 

There was some chop with a bit of spray coming aboard every now and then, but the boat was scooting along and felt controllable. With his towering and un–reefed rig Michael was pointing higher than I was, and he moved further and further to windward while I continued at slightly higher speed but a lower angle. Gradually the scale of the main lake dawned on me as that tack continued for what must have been about twenty or so minutes. I consulted the boating map that Michael had sent as a PDF which I had printed out, put in a waterproof map wallet and attached to the rudder downhaul line. The Sea to Summit medium case guide map wallet was apparently not at all waterproof, and it was interesting to see how the different coloured inks diffused at different rates through the wet paper. Eventually, when I could make out the individual trees and the shoreline of the island, I went about and started a long port tack towards the distant eastern shore of the lake, with Michael a long way to windward.

In Sydney Harbour where I sail most of the time, I don’t get much of a chance to do long tacks and feel out the boat’s performance, but here I was starting to get a better sense of when I was pinching and losing power. Initially this was as I subconsciously tried to follow Michael’s wake, but once he became a distant triangle of white to windward, it was more when I noticed the power fade and the boat balance become more “sloshy” in the chop. Bearing away, the power came back, I could lean comfortably back into the windward gunwale, with my foot braced against the centreboard case, and slice through the waves with plenty of tiller authority. The handy lines of foam, marking the wind direction like a sea of grid paper in a life–sized instructional sailing diagram, gave me confidence that I was still making good progress to windward, just not at the rate Michael could do with his high aspect ratio rig.

That first tack was as close as I got to the western shore of the main lake, which Michael had warned was shallower and had more rocks. My remaining tacks favoured the eastern shore where there was less fetch for the waves, and where the shoreline wasn’t too distant in order to make out where the Shelly Beach campsite (and presumably Don) was located in the endless line of trees. Looking to windward I can remember the north end of the lake under low, dark grey clouds, which always seemed to be threatening heavy rain that never quite seemed to eventuate. Finally I caught up with the other two boats which were pulled up under some trees on the shoreline. As I closed with the shore, the wind fell away to a calm with clear glassy water over a sandy bottom. I was able to drop the sail and row into another of those amazing Myall Lakes anchorages exactly the size of my boat, between a pair of paperbark trees. Looking back out across the lake to the rain–wrapped hills, there was almost no indication that there was any sort of wind or waves on the water, so consider yourself warned. Looking up between the paperbark trees there was a cleared, tree–bordered grassy area, with a line of deserted camp sites marked out with stumpy wooden posts.

Given that I was a long sail, boat pack up, and short drive away from the nearest motel, my job was now to construct a small house, furnish it with bedding, make a wholesome dinner, and get enough rest through a rainy night to do it all again tomorrow. Michael and Don were already hard at work, stopping only to warn me that they snored (as do I), so I started popping hatches and hauling the various treasures from a shopping spree at Ray’s Outdoors the previous weekend up to the next unoccupied camp site.

My boat has seven separate hatches (because camping) with four of them covering “L” shaped compartments. These compartments can hold one big thing, and a small thing stuffed into the small part of the “L”, because that was the shape of the seats they sit behind. In the forward port side “L” I had my ground sheet stuffed into the small bit, with the tent and camping chair in the main section enclosed in a large dry bag. The ground sheet was a 10×12 foot heavy–duty tarp, which I spread out on the campsite silver side up. The tent was a compact and light two person hiking tent, with an unmemorable name that sounded like a mashup of all the 80s action movie titles I could think of. I hadn’t opened it since its purchase, which was possibly unwise, but if Don could do that with his boat and rig I suppose I could just consider it my own milder attempt to live on the edge. The tent was shaped like a broad, trapezoidal coffin, the inner part being a mosquito net upper and waterproof base, supported by magnetic snap–together pole arches which I found quite impressively 21^st century. I would have liked to play with them more but it could start to rain at any point so I attached the arches to the inner and spread the fly out over the top, fussed around, realised it was the wrong way around, and had it all pegged down a few minutes later. I’d brought a heavy hammer from my home workshop for the pegs, but found I could push them easily into the sand by hand. 

The forward starboard “L” had an inflatable mattress and pillow in a small dry bag stuffed into the small part of the compartment, and a down sleeping bag in a big dry bag in the main part. No expense had been spared on the mattress, because the main reason I don’t camp is that I can’t get comfortable enough to sleep properly. It had a multi-cell design and a super clever bag that allows you to inflate the mattress in two or three breaths using a venturi effect. It’s so impressive that when the sales guy demonstrated it to me the other customer waiting for him with her son in tow, gasped audibly in amazement. The bean–shaped inflatable pillow took a similar number of breaths to inflate. Another trip to retrieve clothing, a head lamp and books in more dry bags from the boat, setting up the camp chair, and I was ready to weather the night in my impregnable fabric Air Wolf Thunder Dome Tent–a–Tron.

I went through the task of getting the food and cooking equipment out of the forward buoyancy compartment as I had at lunch, only this time it was more annoying. I also brought up one of the two ten–litre water containers from the centre forward hatch. I realised around this point that I did not know where my EPIRB was, and, mentally reviewing the day, realised I did not have it after lunch and may have left it at Boolambayte Creek. Bugger. Michael was already relaxing in a fully set up camp, enjoying some coffee wine that he had made. He kindly offered me some but it was apparently very strong, and I am a cheap drunk, so I declined. Pretty much everything Michael ate on the trip he’d prepared himself, even the beef was from his farm. He has a dehumidifier at home and carried compact, sealable plastic bags of various meals that he could make up by simply adding boiling water. I munched on liquorice and biscuits while I cooked a tin of chilli con carne from IGA on my fuel stove that I had bought as I was building the boat. This was its first camping trip — only two decades later. I also filled the kettle and used one of my all–in–one coffee sachets to make a coffee. The food hit the spot, but as I was washing up without soap, the chilli oil stuck around for the next few uses of the saucepan and cutlery. So if you’re doing wash–up–lite I’d recommend less oily tinned food early in the trip.

Michael mentioned that keeping food in your tent was not a good idea as bush rats, goannas (I knew from my holidays that they could get pretty big up here) and dingoes, had been known to chew through bags and tents to get at food they could smell. I figured that 9mm marine ply would keep them out a while, so I carried all the food back down to the boat, put it in some of the now empty “L” compartments and secured the hatches. It was getting dark and Don announced he was retiring to try and get over his cold. I was also quite tired, from a series of late nights leading up to the trip, so I also announced I was going to bed. Michael reminded me that fourteen hours can be a long time in a tent, but I thought it would be less logistically difficult to transfer to the tent while it wasn’t raining, and I wanted to find out early if there was anything I needed to fix.

The tent fly had large eaves on either side, so I put empty dry bags under the eaves and tucked in the ground sheet around them, so that if it rained torrentially overnight it wouldn’t turn into a kiddie pool with the tent in the middle. The remaining dry bags I kept around me inside the tent. I changed into my pyjamas (quite hard without standing room) and tried to get comfortable, with more success than previous camping trips, but that is a pretty low bar to be starting from. Good as it was, the mattress wasn’t quite thick enough to stop my shoulder digging into the ground. I think my sleeping position didn’t help, because I normally use my knee to stabilise myself and it was confined in the sleeping bag. The mattress also squeaked loudly as it rubbed against the sleeping bag and tent base. Michael showed me, at some point on the trip, a pillowcase that he made for his inflatable mattress that stops this from happening. In retrospect, I think the best scheme for me would have been to take a sheet and wrap the mattress in that, then unzip the sleeping bag and use it as a quilt. Having my pillow from home and not having had a coffee with dinner might also have helped me nod off more quickly. 

I had brought paperbacks of Herreshoff’s Compleat Cruiser and the first Peter Grant novel, but couldn’t quite set up the head lamp for comfortable reading. An omnidirectional overhead lamp would have been better for that. Surprisingly, my phone had four bars and plenty of charge, which seemed a bit wrong after voyaging into the wilds, but the illuminated screen was much easier to read in this situation, so I did my usual rounds of the New York Times, ABC News, Financial Review, Washington Post and the Guardian apps. I should have bought something to read on Kindle, or headphones for podcasts (Michael says that he watches movies). At times I’d try to lie still trying not to translate every rustle and noise into a pack of bush rats riding goannas hoping to lick chilli oil off my face. At other times it rained, and, although I could hear wind high in the trees, it didn’t find its way down to the tent with any force. At some point in the night the wet fly over my head came into contact with the top of the inner tent and stuck to it, although no water seemed to make it any further than that.

Thanks to Mark Walker for some much–needed copy editing. Continue reading with Day Two.