6:30am on a particularly cold Sunday morning is reason enough for anyone to stay put in bed, but the thought of a newly mapped ride, previously unexplored by Amtra soons saw me spring out of bed and into action. Probably more correctly said, crawl out of bed and into the shower.
Heading north and passing through Gawler we made good time to Dutton pak in little over an hour. Things were looking good, the weathe was fine, and twenty riders had turned up to try the new trails. With Everyone signed in, and big Merv giving the pre ride talk like a seasoned professional, no one would have guessed it was his first crack at leading a ride.
Tossing me the tail ride jacket, Merv gae the instruction to start em up and lets go. Also my first try at tail riding, I thought it best to do a head count, and to my surpirse where there was once 20, we now only had 19, before we had even started! With 19 riders revving their engines and raring to go, we had to shut em down and work out who was missing and why. Apparently Macca (TTR250) had put in a decent session the night before and was a little loose lipped, leggin it off to the main street to relieve himself. We waitied patiently and a few minutes later saw us, with cheers and waves from the young local footy players, head off looking resplendent as a group into the bush.
Generally you could say the track were relatively easy to ride, but by no means boring. Some places wer typical bush trails, weaving in and out of the vegetation on well laid tracks and other times we worked our way through the bush on not so well laid tracks. Exploratory tracks you could say, but Merv always had us convinced he knew where he was.
We even travelled down one of the muddiest and slipperiest roads know to man. It was my sharp wit, albeit a little delayed, that explained why everybody else in front of me was riding on the side of this slip fest and I was the only one in the middle. Without so much as a degree of movement on the bars, I went left, I went right and at one poing I think I was facing the wrong way, but pulled through unscathed with about 10kg of mud under the guards. A bit of fun, I think!
There was a nice hill climb thrown in and just out of Burra, an excellent ride through a dry creek bed which kept us all up on the pegs. Merv came to an abrupt stop claiming the gearbox or clutch just doesn't feel right. A quick inspection proved that the front sprocket on his trusty XR600 was looking a little toothless. Without a spare on hand, we all applied ourselves for a solution and came up with the idea to tighten the chain to apply more tension on the sprocket. Not a perfect fix, but it worked and we were off in 5 minutes.
Further down the track, a Yamaha which had been losing a bit of oil, make that a lot of oil, finally called it a day and wouldn't start. With the group off into the distance, the rider decided to call it quits and find his way back to the start with his other two mates lending help. When I heard one of his mates claim to want to bend him over a tree and ............ for bringing the old leaker along, I was up on the back wheel and out of there! Quickly catching the group I came across Macca having problems. Not with his bike, but having a spit in his helmet! Must have been some night Things were getting interesting.
Arriving at Burra around 1:30pm, we refueled and enjoyed a nice lunch with Burra offerring many bakeries and quality food outlets. So far we had travelled about 130kms with many crawling into town on reserve Fuel.
During the break, Merv and I decided it would be best to do 15-20 minutes of Road travel straight after lunch so that we could cut an hour or two off the return trip and be back at Kapunda around 5:00pm. Miraculously this worked and our timing was pretty much spot on.
But hang on, just as I was lining up behind the last rider ready to depart Burra, the terrible trio which we left back at the tree looking a little disheveled, appeared from nowhere. What a sight! Here was a WR426 towing the old Yammie down the main street for a tow start with a 5 metre length of 6mm rusty wire, with the third mate riding shotgun. As I looked with interest, I thought to myself that the old Yammie seems to have closed the gap on the 426, and Yep, you guessed it, that 6MM peice of wire was being sucked down into the rear sprocket and back wheel of the 426! What a mess. After a quick chat with the lads, it was agreed that they would again find their own way back to kapunda, after missing their only window of hope to rejoin the group.
The rest of the ride home was pretty much the same as the ride up to Burra, with the added bonus of weaving in and out of beautiful lush and green scrub whilst negotiating up and down some deep D gutters. We even had some riders fall victim to these gutters, but luckily none seriously.
We may have a contender for the crash and burn with Bob on only his second ride doing what we have all done before and will probably do again. You know, riding along a straight trail whilst noticing ahead that the trail deviates to the left because there is a big tree directly in front on the trail. And gee that really is a big tree and I just cant seem to take my eyes off it. No matter how hard you wrench on them bars, they just ain't turning the bike, and whammo inthe the tree we all go. Looking back down the trail from the tree, we could see where the single tire track turned into two tire tracks as Bob though a last ditch sliding effort to wash some speed off might work, but it didn't. Lucky there wasn't any greenies in the area because that tree was looking a little worse for wear, but Bob was only a bit shaken and the bike's damage limited to a bent kick starter. Bravely, Bob
Dean Kempe
Hmmmmmm, motor bike...........!!!!
I'll be baaack!!