Sandon river overnighter, June 2010

Author: josh

Category: Trip Reports

Created on Monday, 14 June 2010 08:58

Written by Josh

It was this very same long weekend last year when Holger, Doug, Troy, Craig and myself embarked on an overnighter kayak camping trip up into the Sandon river (NSW) and despite being pretty wet and cold most of the time, we had enough fun to encourage a return trip the following year. Doug and Troy decided to stay at the Sandon camp ground this year (probably to try and get a chance to test ride the new tandem AI) but Holger and myself were joined by Tim and Steve, otherwise known as Riverrat and Balls respectively. Launching from the boat ramp at around 2PM, our plan was to pedal up to a site we'd pinpointed on our previous excursion here.

For the first hour or so we were pushing into the out-going tide so although we didn't have to go far (approx 7km), we had to put in a bit of work. We stopped off briefly to light up the Cobb cooker BBQ, which was perched securely in the rear storage well of my yak. After filling the moat with a homemade marinade (red wine, oyster sauce, soy sauce, wild pepper sauce, cillies, onions and garlic) amd waiting a few minutes for the greenfire heatbead to burn over I then put on the roast. It wasn't long before a hunger-inducing steam was permeating the air around my yak, leaving a human berley trail in my wake. The guys did everything they could to stay in front of me, so as to avoid being tortured by it. A few passing by boaters took great amusement in the sight of the steaming cooker roasting away behind me as I pedalled past.

 

It was somewhere between starting up the Cobb BBQ and adding vegetables (wrapped in foil, placed around the moat to steam, as well as potatoes and pumpkin to the grill that we spotted some brief surface activity. Quick to cast a lure into the action - my first cast of the day - I hooked up almost immediately. What could have been a large bream or more likely tailor, managed to bite through the line before I managed to sight it. With a quick shrug of the shoulders we continued on our way. We barely fished the entire way there, I think mostly because we were really just too busy enjoying the ride.

Right at the very point where we were supposed to take a left, for some reason we went right. At first Holger and I felt confident we were heading in the right direction but the confidence didn't last for Holger (it all looked familiar to me, even though I'd never actually been to this part of the river). We didn't really care either way though, as we'd already passed plenty of good camping spots and were quite happy to continue in search of more. Eventually we found a tidy little perch close by to a dead-end rock wall exposed by the low-tide. So we parked the kayaks, unloaded our gear, pitched our tents, built a fire and then started thinking about eating dinner, which at that point, was cooked to perfection.

By the time the meal was served the fire was also cooking to perfection, making it quite a shame that we elected to use a fireplace too close to the river's edge. The tide obviously doesn't normally come up that high but when king tides are flowing, different story. As the water crept ever closer to the fire, we were like BP in the midst of an oil spill; helpless and unable to come up with any contingency plan to save it. As the dying embers fizzled out with water licking at our ankles I declared it time to build another fire. At that hour - 9PMish - I was the only one silly enough to go stomping through the bush in search of firewood. There was no moon light whatsoever and it was very dark, but equipped with my powerful Petzl Myo XP headlamp I was soon able to scrounge enough wood to start again, and keep it going. We used this new fire to dry our feet.

The weather had been pretty good to us on day one and day two started out just as good. With the morning sunshine beating down we were in no hurry to break camp, so we spent the first couple of hours lazing around drinking tea, coffee and cooking a breakfast of bacon and eggs. But then when blue skies were replaced with grey and the wind started charging in we knew it was time to start packing up. A short while later we were packing gear into the kayaks and preparing to move out.

As fate would have it rain did start falling, but luckily it came just as landed back at the ramp at Sandon. Along the way home I caught two fish, both of them pretty small. The first was a bream that took an Ecogrear SX40, deliberately cast into a steep rockwall and bounced into the water below. The lure was swallowed as soon as I tugged it underneath the surface. The second fish was a flathead, taking the very same lure that I cast towards a thick drop off in the middle of the river. Both fish were returned unharmed.