A Nervous Crossing…

From very early in the planning of our Easter trip, I had been keeping a very close eye on the river levels on the route, especially the Macquarie… And for good reason…

As mentioned a bunch before, it has been a wet year… Super wet… A month out from the trip, the internet told me that the Mac was at about 1.9 metres… I had a long conversation with my Dad about exactly what this means, and apparently there is no standard for river depth measurement and you’re best to just ask the locals…

You will have maybe noticed in the Easter pics that there is all kinds of debris and drift wood lodged WAY up in trees, and the same was true of the Macquarie…

That’s a fucking scary thought…

We stopped at the Mac for some lunch… While the girls swam and made sandwiches with three different kinds of cheese I walked the crossing to see how much effort was going to be required to get across this thing safely… The causeway is just a bunch of river stones arranged in a thirty metre straight line, but the surface is far from level. I guess from years of having four wheel drives punching through it the stones have moved around a lot and there are some nice shallow sections, and some insanely deep holes… I found a pretty nice shallow line on the down river side, and decided that would be where I’d shoot for…

So, with Hajar’s trailer attached I hit it…  The line I had chosen on the left was working out great… It had been a while since I had crossed a river with a Bob trailer though and I had forgotten one important thing…

Bob trailers float…

About ten metres in, the trailer picked itself up and, caught by the fast current and massive amount of water that was rolling across the smooth stones, swung out off the causeway and floated above the deep river…

Fuck…

I’d eaten a bunch of my food, but my total bike and gear weight was still way over twenty kilos, and Hajar’s trailer was about the same… I stood and braced the whole rig for a second and thought about what to do… I couldn’t let the weight move me as I was standing right on the edge on the downside of the causeway and a step to my left would mean a solid swim with a whole lot of expensive bike shit to wrestle…

And so I made for the up-river side of the causeway… Pushing the Fargo, still with the trailer floating at a right angle to my bike, I waded into a hole almost waist deep…

Fuck…

I remember looking down at my bike. Hubs and cranks were properly underwater, and the current was such that the water was pushing so hard against my frame bag the the water ran up over the top… A huge thanks to Eric at Revelate Designs for being an absolute craftsman and building stuff that works amazingly for things like this and people like me. My food was still dry on the other side… Love your work Sir…

A little bit of teeth gritting and leaning into the weight of the water and I was eventually at the other side…

Couple of deep breaths, then I looked back and saw Felicity starting out with her trailer… Ah yeah, pretty sure she’s not expecting this floating bullshit…

I strode back into the river towards her… I passed Rosie looking strong as hell dealing easily with her Ortlieb and Freeloader set up, and just as I got to G-Force her trailer lifted, and she slipped… I grabbed her trailer and pooed a little…

‘Hold it… Hold it…’

Please don’t fall in the fucking river…

She regained her feet, and we stood there for a second, I think both feeling a little like we’d just cheated bad luck out of totally destroying our weekend, then with Felicity weighting the front wheel, and me keeping the rear end and trailer steady, made our way a little tediously to the landing…

Everyone across safe and sound… A change of socks and some M&M’s… Not a lot of time to relax as we were running well behind time, but that’s a story already told…

You can hang out and have beers and talk shit with your friends, but getting through moments like this and having a laugh about it despite how bad things could have turned out is the stuff that friendships are really made of…

Such an awesome trip… Such awesome company…

Thanks to Rosie for the mid-river photography…