When your moonlander doesn’t have enough float…..

Add a boat.

Despite having had a plastic fantastic inflatable boat for nearly a fortnight and riding with it for nearly 80kms last weekend, today was the first time I had free to put it through its paces. I had spent a little time trying to figure out where would be the most appropriate place to take it and came up with the following list:

1. Somewhere without an audience. If it all goes pear shaped, I really don’t want my failures to be public

2. Still water – Beaches and surf are out of the question

3. Fresh water – The bike has copped enough salt water already. I didn’t want to bathe it in salt water just for a test run.

4. A short distance – I had no idea how the thing would actually paddle so modest goals were called for.

Funnily enough, the Hunter river at Raymond Terrace ticked all the boxes so I planned on this route which had a paddle of about 3kms downstream and a 3 km ride to get back to the car.

I parked the car under the bridge and kicked all the makeshift bongs and beer bottles out of the way and set about getting ready. It was clear that many a misspent youth and misspent dole payment had occurred underneath this bridge. There was a sketchy accessway to the murky water which was littered with drift wood and rubbish which didn’t look very inviting but I gave myself a mental poke and decided to harden up.

My makeshift inflation bag comprised of a robust garbage bag and a cut off piece of funnel (known as the B-rad method) worked a treat and I had my boat inflated in no time. I still have a little bit of practice to go since my boat doesn’t have a one way valve and requires some deft valve manipulation to avoid constantly loosing air. I had only tried the inflation bag indoors where it is hard to get it to billow and collect air but outdoors in the howling wind, the real trick was trying to hang onto it as it formed a makeshift spinnaker.

The 20 cent inflation bag

Air goes in here

I pulled the wheels off the moonlander and stacked the whole thing on the boat and strapped it all down using the cam lock straps and bungee chord I had used to strap the boat onto the rack. I had pulled the non drive side pedal off since it dug awkwardly into the floor of the boat. The whole thing looked pretty dodgy but I couldn’t figure out a better way to make it happen so just shrugged and headed for the water.

A handy strapping anchor point on the moonlander fork

Who would have thought rowlocks would come in handy?

Worlds best bungee chord

I have to admitt to being very nervous as I had no idea whether it was going to float as I dragged the boat across some ugly looking rocks and clambered inside issuing all grace and style.

It passed the first test – I was still above the water line.

A few haphazzard paddle strokes and I was away from the bank and the wind caught me and started me off downstream.

From there, it was an idyllic float along some lovely reed lined river banks as I enjoyed the sunshine and views. As the river twisted and turned, the apparent angle of the wind changed so I kept to the shoreline as best as possible to remain in the lee and calm water. Whenever I strayed to far away from the bank, the wind would catch me and i’d have to paddle HARD to get back on course. I was pleased that it was in fact possible to make headway directly into the wind however it was very slow going and it was clear that picking favourable conditions was the key to successfully crossing some waterways in the future.

Yours truly

I finished up in the riverside park in Raymond Terrace and packed everything away before pedalling back to the car. The packup was pretty smooth and took about 10 minutes so a little more practice is needed to streamline my methods.

I survived and nothing went wrong!

Overall, it was an outstanding success. I’m pretty chuffed that the ironically named “Collosus” boat by sevylor worked well enough to let me dabble in pack rafting until I can get my hands on an Alpaca raft.