Albury Whirlwind- The Great Big Paddle Project 2009

Whirlwind. Amazing how you can start the ball rolling six months earlier and then, with the beginning merely hours away the final pieces pull into place. This was the case yesterday, as I woke up with 24 hours to play with still without a sat phone, solar chargers for the laptop/camera/phone, and, most importantly, I still didn’t have any bloomin’ paddle!



One by one, though, the worm turned. www.powertraveller.com.au have these brilliant solargorillas, or so they’re branded. A clamshell solar panel and 800g hard drive that between them negate the need for mains power. Quite handy. They’d been sent through to an Albury retailer in the nick of time. Northern Victoria’s ABC station provided 20 minutes of airwave bashing before a small shop called Reconnect @ Wodonga upped my communications capability. With a hard seven day hike to and from the Murray source comes the need to circumnavigate the only dead space that Telstra’s NextG mobile phone signal can’t reach – so they loaned a sat phone, just in case. A few extras later and my mobile phone, earlier kindly provided by the Green family in Warnbro, WA, was swelling with credit and even had a little aerial to defeat remote silences.



A tripod, bag and battery from a store with an enormous camera mural on the side left us with an important visit to a teacher from the local school. Even as we pulled into his drive we weren’t sure whether ‘Dutchy’ had yet taken receipt of the expedition paddling essentials sent over by Palm Equipment in the UK. Thankfully, there they were, paddles and kags, skirts and bladders. All lingo, you understand, but these were the final pieces in my kayaking checklist.

I’ve been based at the house of Ro Privett, who paddled the Murray in 2005 and has been an invaluable source of information, contacts and now, friendship. How we throw ourselves into these missions of life only to be rewarded for our positive foolishness by the arrival of yet another of your ilk. A super guy, Ro is your mountain surfing, four wheel drive driving Australian stereotype with a casual demeanour that would make a sloth appear to have ADHD. His enthusiasm for my little expedition, though, has been second to none, and reminds me that even when you’re in the middle of your most extensive solo expedition other people still play a huge role.



Ro’s lounge is still awash with kit ready to be packed, and with our departure time barely two hours away I suppose I should go and deposit it into bags. My big yellow kayak, provided by Wilderness Systems, is to be my home for much of the next 12 weeks and with sentimentality to the fore, she is exactly the same banana yellow as Elsa, the beloved carbon skateboard that helped me across Australia from Perth to Brisbane in 2006.

To be back in Oz, a country I am utterly besotted by, is a privilege. To be on the verge of travelling its greatest river, The Murray, from its very source in an inauspicious clearing named Cowombat flat to its mouth some 80km south of Adelaide in South Australia, well, I feel like a very lucky man. Thank you to every individual and company that has put me in the position to make this attempt, this is the adventure of my lifetime so far, I look forward to sharing it with you.



Watch Dave's video diaries on the Great Big Paddle's very own YouTube channel. Official Great Big Paddle Project siteTwitter- Dave Cornthwaite

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