Day 24 Report

.Day 24 - 19/6/07 - Into Surat

Bruce's Report: I dropped Steve out on the road early and spent the morning downloading and saving film while Kerrie went to the school to arrange a visit for tomorrow. Steve surprised us all by arriving at the campsite earlier than expected after walking 25 kms into town.

After a tour of the local museum we filmed Steve doing a piece de camera on the riverbank. The campers on the far bank had been expecting him to paddle in so there was some good natured banter about "wimps" and "losers" until we decided to throw him in the kayak for the benefit of the spectators. We had great fun especially when Fay Jackson nearly ended up in the river handing Steve a beer for his trouble. Steve took the opportunity to paddle to the weir and checked out the situation for the next day. It was decided there was not enough water so we went to the pub for dinner and chatted with some lovely people.

Steve's Report: Tomorrow we are presenting at the Surat School at 9.00am. Then it is off towards St George. It was bitterly cold today with a cold south westerly wind blowing. I thought today was going to be easy with only 25km to walk. Life never works out the same as you think though and I found out how tough it was walking up hills about 5km long against a strong headwind. It is amazing the difference trees make to the wind. Even at 20m - 50m apart the amount of wind is much less than on exposed plains.

Because I arrived at Surat around 2.00pm there was time to look at the museum and to put on a show on the weir for the grey nomads. This was fun and so I paddled down to the weir for a look. There seemed to be a good flow over it but when we went about 500m downstream we could see that the Ballonne was not running with enough water to paddle.

The achilles seems to be holding up and the infection in my index finger seems to be settling down so life is good. (Just very cold)

Bruce spends lots of time on the computer Fay Jackson shouts Steve a beer on the Surat weir
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Images by Bruce Lumb - Refer to copyright notice