South Aussie 2003
We
returned to the beaches at South Australia in January 2003.
Wokka, Deb1
and I headed over for
some fun in the sun and some beach riding.
10 km into the first ride, we pulled up on a scenic bit only to see that Wokka's bike was spewing out oil! He had been riding bloody hard, which had exacerbated a latent minor problem with the seal. This meant that we lost the following morning to the mechanics at Millicent, who were unreal, and fixed it no worries.
We rode 80km on a great stretch of beach near Southend. It was bloody hard going, and the 400 and 350 were working bloody hard to shift the coarse wet sand underneath. After 80km, still on the beach, we ran out of fuel. Woops. I had not allowed much for the extra fuel the sand would use up. The new mileage was about 20 mile per gallon, or 8.5 km per litre. That is a bit better than what my old car gets on the highway when towing a trailer. Not bad considering the mass which the bike was shifting was about 1/10th of the car and trailer.
Anyway, we put the reserve fuel of Wokka's bike into mine, and I rode 25 k's to Millicent, half of which was sand riding, filled up, then rode back to Wokka, and put some into his, just enough to get back to the car, which we had to access via bitumen roads as it was by then dark. We only just got off the beach in time, as you cant negotiate sand via a headlight. The sun was decending as we sloppily rode off in the poor light. We were literally jumping the bikes over the sand bumps without ever seeing the jump. Anyway, we made it back to camp at midnight instead of 7pm, to meet Deb, who, understandably, was getting worried.
I rode twice from Robe to Kingston, once with Wokka, and once with Deb pillion. I was bloody exhausted after the pillion effort, over 100km of beach riding pillion is tough. We were actually jumping the bike at 70km/hour, getting air over the gentle natural jumps on the beach. That was pretty exciting. Going solo with Wokka on the flatter setions of beach toward Kingston, I was doing powerslides consistently at 80km/hr to rear - wheel - steer around waves, then I gradually gained confidence to do one at 100km/hr! Great stuff.
Also did some fishing, and caught two sting rays, each about 3 foot long. Broke the rod on the second one.
