Fun and games

Howdy all.

Been having a bit of fun over the last couple of months.

Firstly, we finished up at Cannington in December and moved all the gear back to the office in Brisbane. The vehicles went back to 4WD Hire after 12 months of rental.

I then went home for a break but flew back to Brisbane for the work Christmas party. Unfortunately I came down with a stomach bug about 3 hours before dinner arrived. The worst part is it was an open bar with James Squire on tap and I couldn't even finish one beer :(

Went home again for some more break, Christmas and New Years etc.
Saw Mental as Anything at Sawtell RSL for New Year's Eve.

13th of January I flew back to Brisbane to get the gear ready for mobilising to South Australia. Unfortunately the newest member of the crew needed to do a defensive driving course before being allowed on the road so Pete and I headed off to Andamooka, South Australia to get camp set up.
Four days of driving later we arrived at camp, Les and Les (the newbie) arrived a couple of days later.
We had some of the gear out on Andamooka Island where we will be doing the survey, Andamooka Island is an island on the "dry" salt lake, Lake Torrens. Then some rain came... 13 inches in 2 days... The "dry" lake was no longer dry, there was water everywhere, the flood came within metres of the homestead we were staying at.

Andamooka Homestead

Andamooka outbuilding

We were flooded in for a couple of days while we waited for the water levels to go down. The road out was underwater so we tried to get out a back way but after travelling a couple of hours to go 5km we gave up and went back to the homestead.


We tried again the next day but out the road this time.

The road out

We drove 40km in 12 hours. Slipping and sliding through mud and boggy sand, driving over sand dunes to avoid the worst spots, lucky we had 3 vehicles to pull each other out when we got stuck. We were 5km from the bitumen road when we came to a little bit of a problem.

End of the road

A rapidly flowing river that was over 6ft deep, no chance of going through, way too far to go around.

Tried to go around the river. It stayed there.

We got someone from the other side to come with a boat and we ferried our gear across using that, however the boat didn't have a motor... or oars for that matter... we had to pull it back and forwards across the river with ropes. We got all the gear and personnel across, left our trucks on the side of the road and got a lift into Roxby Downs for some pizza, beer and a sleep. We flew home the next day.

View of all the water from the air. Lake Torrens in the background.

Well, some of us flew home, I got to Sydney and had to wait 8 hours for my lift home, the freeway from Sydney to Newcastle was closed because of a bushfire. I ended up staying the night in Sydney and went home the next day.

After 3 weeks at home on standby we got the call to say the lake had dried out sufficiently for us to go do some work...

To be continued.