Day 34, Wongulla Landing – Younghusband, 15 Nov

Tony

I feel like I’m just chasing my way to the finish line today and I pass the marker saying 200 km to the mouth – I can just smell the sea now! All morning it’s tall reeds and willow trees and I have a breeze battling me until midday, it’s only around 15km/h though.

I pass a canoe club but the people aren’t around. When I see the kayaks I feel that sense of pride that you get when you pull up at the lights next to someone in the same car as you! There’s a rock at the water’s edge which I love because it’s a tiny independent ecosystem – slimy algae-like covering, grasses and flowers. It looks like it could push away and float downstream to another location for a change of scenery – hey, maybe it’s the natural flora version of a houseboat! There’s also a cool rock formation that has a hole running right through it – I wonder how that was formed…

There are lagoons running parallel to the river and long straights again. The cliffs of the last week have all but gone and there’s rolling countryside surrounding me – the escarpment is far from the river and I can sometimes see up to 40km across valleys. Youngsters in speedboats fly up and down. Even though they can see that their wakes are playing havoc with my kayak they carry on passing only 20 feet from me. I don’t say anything and paddle faster to get clear of them.

It’s another pretty tiring day and I’m happy to get out at Younghusband, where we camp in front of the river, with a shop and some shacks across the road, and say hello to some fishermen, who confess that they rarely catch much, but just love spending any spare time they’ve got throwing in a line and sometimes a pot for yabbies. That’s what we’ve found from people up and down the river – our Murray doesn’t serve up supper!

Distance paddled: 48 km

Pan

Yesterday evening, at Wongulla Landing (the signs insist ‘No Camping’), a lady that has a holiday home across the road told Tony that sprinklers pop up and come on at about 6am. So he had a look around and saw that there was one right in front of my tent, he grabbed a little table that was sitting nearby, turned it upside-down, lay it over the sprinkler and warned me not to move it. “No problem, I’m usually up by 5:30”, I say and thank him for taking the precaution.

I wake at about 2am, seemingly for no particular reason. Then I hear the rushing of water. I look out of my tent and can’t see any catastrophes yet. I tilt the table towards me to see if the sprinkler pops up - it doesn’t. But the ground around my tent door is wet and I can see another sprinkler jetting out an arc of water over the other lawn, so I unpeg my tent, move it just 5 metres to behind a bench  at the top of my riverside green and put the table out of the way as we don’t want to damage the sprinklers.

A while later, either the sprinkler that I uncovered or another one is raining down on the tent. ‘Bloody hell!’, I think, ‘If it aint the birds, it’s the irrigation keeping me awake.’ Serves us right for camping in a recreational area! But it’s not so bad, there’s some water on the outer sheet of the tent but it doesn’t soak through to inside and the ground draws a bit of moisture up to the sleeping bag… no major drama!

I’m up pretty early to the sound of those damn cockatoos but I’m gifted with a good sunrise over the cliff opposite.

Once Tony’s on the river, I drive to Younghusband via Mannum, stopping to have a quick look at the town, but it’s still very early so nothing’s open yet. I pass a boat builder’s yard and the almost completed houseboat hovering near the launch ramp makes me think of the Jetsons or some other 60s sci-fi TV show.

At our meeting point, the fishermen that arrive in the afternoon have a couple of brilliant eight-week-old pups that lick and bite me to death – I love ‘em! After Tony arrives, I pitch my tent around the corner on a lawn that runs along the river behind an area of high corn. On my way back to the van, I pass the wings and other parts of what looks like an eagle, and then further down, the remains of a much larger animal – half of a spine… what the hell is lurking in that corn?! Maybe tonight will finally be the night that I come face to face with one of the deadly snakes that Australians go on about to scare tourists.
“Tony, if you hear a muffled scream in the middle of the night, run quickly to my tent, will ya?!”

Tony rustles up a good teriyaki chicken and then puts on another one of his chick flicks. It’s good when Tony finishes early and also good to be near towns down here at the bottom of the river - the road navigation is easy and we get a bit of time to relax in the evening.