Having thawed out from Southbrook, we return to assist Kilkivan Endurance with another horse endurance ride. This takes place just a week after the town got rattled by an earthquake that was allegedly felt as far away as Sydney: we’re blaming Simon & Rob bouncing around Widgee back-roads for that. The set-up here is much the same as it was earlier in the year, there’s a 160km, 80km, 40km and 20km ride in this event. For this we’ll be using 2m simplex communications.
Getting there proved to be a challenge once again, with the suggestion of the navigator to turn off being ignored by the driver, so once again we sailed passed the required turn-off and thus had a bit of back-road navigation to get to Kilkivan. Nonetheless though, we got there. Maybe next year we’ll get it right.
David VK4MDL and I ran a checkpoint that is roughly 8~10km outside Kilkivan on the Kilkivan Tansey Road, and just beside the road, so rather than setting up back at base, we called in at base then towed the caravan to the checkpoint and camped out there. In terms of communications, David’s mobile phone has sketch communications when relying on its internal antenna.
I put a 4G antenna on the roof of the caravan, plugged it into my phone and set up a WiFi hotspot — this yielded a faster Internet link than what I get at home. Introducing David’s phone to my phone’s hotspot allowed him to use WiFi calling quite reliably. Once again, I keep thinking mobile phone makers need to re-introduce external antenna ports on their devices, they are useless without a network.
From the radio perspective, I ran a cross-band repeater so we could operate with hand-held radios around the caravan.
The colours are off on those photos because I got the colour temperature setting wrong… tried to fix so it’s a bit less “blue”, but if the colours look funny, that’s my fault. On the outgoing leg, riders will be passing behind our caravan, crossing the road then resuming the track over the other side, then on the return, they’ll be doing the reverse.
We had dinner in the fading light then turned in early for the night. At that point we didn’t have rider numbers, but that’s fine, we could catch up with that in the morning. It was our understanding we wouldn’t see riders until about 4AM, so we set the alarms for 3AM and got some sleep.
Imagine our surprise when we came to at around 2AM, to distant torch light shining on the van and feint hoof-beats. Horses! I flew out of bed, grabbed a clipboard and pen and raced out to grab the numbers. Luckily, they were the first ones through, but it was a rude awakening! They were 160km competitors, an event we didn’t think was even coming through our checkpoint. Double whammy for us, apparently base had been trying to call us, but the cross-band radio had been knocked off-frequency, so we didn’t hear them. Oops!
It took only a brief moment to radio those first two through, then set up the tablet with the new division, then get the competitor numbers for all three rides from base. Later we had to assist one of the riders with a loose shoe. There are two ways to fix a shoe to a horse, one is to nail it there, but a more modern approach is to glue it. Sometimes this glue loses its stick, and the shoe has to be removed. The antics of the horse whilst we waited for help to arrive was quite amusing, the rider deciding to have a little snack. Horses’ sense of smell is very good, and despite getting a carrot for a snack, sometimes human food smells too irresistible to leave alone. Eventually, help did arrive with the horse’s owner and a ride official.
In this case, the loose shoe got replaced by a boot. Watching a horse walk with a boot they’re not accustomed to wearing is quite amusing, the hoof gets raised quite high as they’re not quite sure what to make of it.
As the darkness gave way to sunrise, we had the 80km and 160km riders passing through simultaneously, going in opposite directions which is always fun to deal with. Things went fairly smoothly after that. In the late morning, we did have call for one horse float, a horse had copped a stone in the hoof and was in no fit state to continue the ride. A call to base, and about 15 minutes later, the horse and rider were loaded up and heading back to the showgrounds.
Things progressed quietly from there. Small groups of competitors passing through. Given the early start, we decide to remain at the checkpoint one more night and head back to base in the morning. Dinner and our last competitors turn up at about the same time, winding things up at around 5:30PM.
There was a bit of miscommunication at this event regarding what competitors we should be expecting and when, but other than that, things mostly ran smoothly. Camping on the checkpoint isn’t always possible, but it makes things a lot more comfortable, especially as there’s no facilities of any kind on the checkpoint. In all though, this was an enjoyable event, even if it involved an unexpected wake-up call.