Mike's Stag

Hot off the heels of Marcus’ stag is Mike’s stag. Rach and Mike who are getting married next week are renowned for their adventures in camping, trekking, mountain biking to name but a few, so it was no surprise that Mike’s stag would involve some sort of extreme element – so it would be that we would spend the weekend kayaking through the Kangaroo Valley slightly south of Sydney. The weather all week was pretty rainy so I packed with that in mind, when we arrived at the river on Saturday morning the rain had cleared and the sun was shining, perfect you’d think – but the wind was blowing gale force and worse still it was blowing into our faces.

Not really noticing the wind Hari, my Kayak partner jumped into the Kayak with all our gear and promptly fell straight overboard. Not a great start but at least we knew it was possible and would be making sure it didn’t happen again! The kayak from the drop off point to the camping ground is supposed to only take a couple of hours, however after 4.5 hours of kayaking we hit a stretch of water that was more suitable for surfers as it had waves! We looked at the bank and no matter how hard we paddled against the wind we actually started to go backwards so we decided to forget about the camp area and find our own. This was good fun as we found a little side stream which lead to a bank which we climbed, walked through some trees (which had branches falling down around us) and to a clearing which had some power lines above us. This was to be our camp.

Campsite Ground Zero

There was loads of kangaroos running around and even one with a Joey. We had a great night of boozing and some guitar action one of the group even got Mike to wear some more traditional stag clothes –

Mike the Stag

The next morning it was hard to tell if Mike had enjoyed himself so far as he had gone very quiet and was slightly worse for wear for the indulgence in alcohol the night before, Matt said it might be sympathy sickness but I don’t think Mike was so sure.

So we started off on the kayak into the wind which hadn’t really died down much, thinking it would be another 4.5 hours of kayaking to the end. Luckily we bumped into a group that had made it to the camp site and been told to kayak back the other way, which we did do and took us what felt like about 15 minutes!

Great weekend lots of exercise the past two!