25 days stargazing from my swag

[efeinblatt]

Some teaser images from my recent trip: Perth-Esperance-Perth and spots in between. Will fill in the details during the next couple of days. (Yes, I got bogged. Badly bogged!)

Well, just going to have to wait for some image help (help arrived from NJ SWB and Sharkcaver), but I'll start with the nitty gritty. Here, in order of absolute need, is the equipment I relied upon most:

• shovel, snatch strap and shackle
• uhf radio - don't have a fixed one, so I use a baofeng handheld which works perfectly
• rapid tyre deflator and tyre compressor and accurate tyre gauge (actually I prefer the Staun deflators and moved back and forth between those and the rapid one). I now see the advantage of having the compressor mounted under the hood! It was a PITA to take it out of the vehicle all of the time.
• Delorme InReach SE. This was my first long solo trip in Australia and I wanted to keep in touch with my wife and son who were visiting family in the UK. Worked great. Much better than a SPOT because it syncs with your cellphone and you can actually text back and forth. Expensive.
• a dirty gear bag. Don't get me started about the yahoos who leave their shit all over the place. They're the same ones who think their cellphone conversations in a Perth restaurant should be everybody's business. And, yes, it's unfortunate, but they're the 4x4 rape and pillage crowd.
• a fridge/freezer. The Evakool worked great
• solar panels to keep the fridge going when you stay in one place for a few days

Trip report begins on 2nd Page

[stevemc181]

Can't see any of the pics?

[efeinblatt]

yes, I know. Am working on it. Seems that the images must be too large. And trying to resize through HTML, but it doesn't seem to work. Maybe have to manually resize....

[stevemc181]

yes, I know. Am working on it. Seems that the images must be too large. And trying to resize through HTML, but it doesn't seem to work. Maybe have to manually resize....

Sometimes it is easier to open a free photobucket account and upload the images to that and just copy and paste the links to the images.

[KiwiNTPajero]

the link in the 1st post worked for me.I really like some of your pictures.I like that model older Pajero.What year /model is it.I only know NP and newer

[efeinblatt]

the link in the 1st post worked for me.I really like some of your pictures.I like that model older Pajero.What year /model is it.I only know NP and newer

Yeah, the link in the first post is to the entire album. I want to link to each image individually and tell the story of the trip but, for some reason, the images aren't showing up.

It's a 1992 NH. Diesel Intercooler. Great condition. Great car, but when I do get to tell the story, I have some commentary to go long.

[msman]

looks like a great trip.
whats the tree with the steps in the 5-6 photo? and the yellow suspended ring a few frmo the bottom?

[efeinblatt]

Yeah, the trip was fantastic.
The tree is the Boorara Tree outside of Northcliffe. Took some long back roads to get there, and when I arrived the site was 'closed' and the road blocked with cones. Well, I hadn't come all that way to turn back, and it was lunchtime, so I moved the cones aside and went up the road to the site, which was blissfully peaceful. It was in some disrepair. I hope they restore the place. But it was a magical lunch all alone.
The circle above the trees is part of an art exhibition interpreting the changing landscape in and around Mt. Franklin National Park. It's above Walpole and the site is named Swarbrick. A beautiful loop walk through the forest.

[sharkcaver]

Some nice shots in there, Cant wait to hear the blow by blow account.

I noticed you took that stupid bloody ring burner



Shane.

EDIT: BTW I resize all my images before I upload to photobucket to 1024 x 768. I use ifranview for the edit.

Having a play with your smug mug, I cant get it to take either. Its not image size, its something with the url code

Just a question, I note the url has the security protocol (s) after http IE https. Have you got the account set up for public sharing?

[efeinblatt]

Not my ring burner, Shane. It belongs to the lady in that cuckoo chair! I travelled with a 2 burner primus and a single burner butane.

I also resized and loaded one of the pics to Dropbox, and that didn't work either. Could it have anything to do with my permissions on the forum itself? (Also tried using just the http not https address, and that didn't work either.)

When are you leaving for Fitzgerald? I have a lot to say about it.

[sharkcaver]

having a play with smug mug and I went onto the sharing page:

http://help.smugmug.com/customer/en/portal/articles/93254-how-do-i-share-my-photos-

I note part way down, the sharing dropbox gives you sharing options. What you need is the BB code tab to have it inserted into the forum post. For some reason, your share dropbox is not giving these options. I therefore assume its something to do with the way your account is set up. See pic attached below:

[efeinblatt]

Let's see if it works....Wow. It does. You are the very best Shane!!!! Thank you.



Not an auspicious beginning to the trip - and it gets worse .... By the time I hit Safety Bay on the Kiwana, the air conditioning had conked out. Now this is the air conditioning that was looked over a week before by a very highfalutin western suburbs shop where I paid big bucks to get a lot of electrical work done and the vehicle tuned up for the trip. I let them know that the air kept conking out when the car heated up but, strangely, would work fine again once it cooled off - usually the following day. They checked the gas and the pressure and said it was all OK, just a quirk. I didn't leave without asking if they checked all the belts as I had requested. "Yep, sure did." When I looked under the hood at my first camp site of the trip, Sues Bridge, I saw that the air conditioning belt was completely broken - not sure why it hadn't fallen onto the highway. Took the vehicle into the Caltex station in Augusta in the morning. Old school mechanics. Not only was the this belt shot, but the other two where shredded and THE WRONG SIZES. Had to wait around for the right sizes to be delivered from Margaret River. Lazy afternoon catching fish off the town jetty. In hindsight, it should have been obvious that the heat was making the belt slip, which was causing the air conditioning to malfunction. Good diagnosticians are a rare breed. But hey, belts must be too low class to check over for such a high class garage in Perth! Will ask them to split the $155 bill with me.



The next day I tooted comfortably around Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park. A side road through the park took me to this vantage point overlooking the almost deserted Skippy Rock. I mark this as the beginning of the trip and remember how in awe I was when I first travelled here several years ago. A day's trip from Perth and paradise begins.
Stayed the night at Snotty Gobble campsite near Pemberton. Yawn. Forgot to say that the new Mossie Dome I brought with me on the trip was in a shambles when I opened it. (Lesson learned: check your equipment.) 3 cracked poles and the shock cord was in pieces. Slept with it laying over me the first night, but repaired it with stuff I bought in a terrific camping store next to the garage in Augusta. No mossies this night.



This is where it gets interesting. The picture doesn't do the situation justice. It's taken after we had spent an hour digging out the sand from under the right side tyres. The tilt of the car before the digging was pretty scary. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I visited the Yeagarup Dunes several years ago. Not in a 4x4, but in an old Mazda, and I promised myself I would come back one day and 'do it.' Well today was to be the day. Now, I hate driving in soft sand, and I'm obviously not very adept at it. I can do snow and I can do ice, but I can't do sand - it freaks me out. So, I didn't just 'do it.' I asked the few people who were there about the best technique, the difficult stretches, the optimum tyre pressure - 12psi - and got assurances that the Paj would make it no problem. Well, maybe it would have with a different driver! I put the car into 4HLc, built up momentum on the flat stretch, and tackled the hill in 2nd gear. 2/3rds the way up, the car just punked out. I was flooring it, but it was like I was doing nothing. No power whatsoever. Backed down, and tried again with the same technique but went even a little faster. Same story. No power as I approached the top. I wasn't thinking straight, and I was stubborn, so I backed down the hill and did the same thing one more time with the same result. Called it quits then and backed down the hill very badly. Too close to the edge, sand slipped out from under the car and BOOM. Tilted way over to the left on the edge of that sandy cliff. (The pic shows the Paj, after we were able to move it back away from the tree, which is where I would have landed if I had tried to do anything on my own.) I got out of the car and waited. And waited.

So, finally a ranger comes by. She looks at me and looks at the car and looks back and me and shakes her head and asks me what I was thinking, etc., etc. She had that light feminine touch that makes a man feel so good . A real dick shrinker she was. 'Well' she says, 'for 3 thousand dollars I can get the tractor in town to come out here and get you out, because you're probably not going to get out any other way.' I didn't like that calculation. She said that the chief ranger was about 2 hours away and she wasn't able to reach him on her VHF or UHF or I don't know what but perhaps he could come up with another solution if he ever turned up. Anyway, 'I'll check on you in a couple of hours.' And off she went. Not to be seen or heard from again I might add. So I waited. And waited. And, honestly, I was a wee bit frazzled. It was a little too early to end this trip that I had been longing to do for so long.

Well, out of nowhere, along comes 21 year old Mathew, the avocado farmer in his beat up 110 Defender Ute. He was just taking a break and wanted to see how the dunes looked. I kid you not.



He studied the situation, basically said I was in deep shit, but that, together, he thought we might be able to get me out of my mess. Did I have a snatch strap and shackle? 'YES, I do', and I would have married him on the spot . So for 3 hours we dug and towed and dug and towed and dug and towed some more, and little by little we inched the car into a safe zone. (BTW, he was directing me what to do on a UHF channel - so those Baofengs came in handy - and, along with the shovel, snatch strap, and shackle, something I'll never ever leave home without. The guy was great, trying to hide how much he was sweating it, but he was one of the coolest dudes I've ever ever met. Thanked him with several cold beers and an excellent chorizo which we sliced with some big ass knife he carried with him. The beers, by the way, are EMU Export - the same brand some of you guys gave Shane grief over. When Mathew saw the beer, he remarked gleefully, 'that's my brew, don't see many Perth people drink that.'

BTW, Mathew never did make it up over the dunes. Said he had had enough sand for one day.

Frazzled and chastened, I hurried to the nearest campsite - Leaning Marri - which was only a few minutes down the road from the Yeagarup picnic (and tyre deflation) area. The site was deserted and the rains were coming in, so I setup in the group camp kitchen sheltered area for the night. The following morning I headed to Windy Harbor, which I had visited several years ago. I intended simply to picnic there, but still exhausted from the prior day's experience, I decided to spend the night in the very old school caravan park. Nice simple place. Plenty of space, and hot water for the showers. Set-up a windbreak with a tarp - I carried two with me. Knots I'm glad I know how to tie: clove hitch, bowline, half-hitch, and midshipman's hitch.



These 2 very old and salt-encrusted cruisers had each brought a tinny down to the beach for a day of fishing.

I left the next morning heading in the direction of Denmark where I planned to visit a friend. Took a very roundabout way to visit the Boorara Tree - see discussion several posts below - where I had a peaceful, undisturbed lunch. Then onto Banksia Camp where I intended to spend the night, which didn't happen. I started down the sand road to the site - still very gun shy about driving on sand - when a Ranger passed in the other direction and let me know that the site was full. Actually, I was relieved I didn't have to make the trip. So, I headed back and took the drive down to the stunning Mandalay beach. Couldn't bring myself to stay at the Crystal Springs site, which seemed just too close to the main road, so I continued on my trek to Denmark.



Boorara Tree



Mandalay Beach

[nj swb]

Nice Paj! I like the Gen 2s.

I can't figure out what's going on with your smugmug links, but I think the problem with this forum is that IMG links need to point directly to the picture file, not some HTML file.

Try this:

Right click on your pic at smugmug, then select Properties.
Find the "Address" for the pic, and select it - all of it. What's visible probably isn't all of it - I find a triple click gets it all.
Copy the entire url (which ends with a .jpg for the pic I tried) then insert it in your post, wrapped in IMG tags.

Voila!



Edit: Shane fixed it...

[sharkcaver]

I notice if you click the info tab, the pictures exif data comes up. You can select the map tab to download any gps tagging if you have it on. I notice you got bogged heading up towards yaegerup dunes. A group of us off the forum went there in 2014 IIRC. Looking at the pic, I think I recall the place as it happens.

Sometimes I wish I had the gps module attached to my camera. It certainly helps after many photo's of exactly where it was taken. A lot of the time, I have to go back through my gps log to work out what was taken where.

Looking forward to the rest of the report. 25 nights in one trip. You will put me to shame. Nice one.

[stevemc181]

I know the feeling well getting stuck down at Yeagarup. I did an almost identical thing, slipping from a dune sideways while not taking enough care backing down for a 2nd go. Couldn't go forwards or backwards, but luckily I had the winch and a passerby who stopped to help. I used their vehicle as an anchor point to get the front dragged around and pointing back up the hill, from there it was easy.

Was a prick of a spot and pure driver error, but to make matters worse it was a long weekend and every second vehicle that passed stopped for a picture opportunity at my expense