Darling River Dash

So I'm finally in Wilcannia. Came down here from Broken Hill on Friday night with Jason and other assorted med students so that we could race in the Darling River Dash on Saturday. According to local folklore that I couldn't quite get to the bottom of, this was either the first time that the Dash had been raced or the first time that it'd been raced in 10 years. Anyway, the general idea was that you and your team dashed down the Darling from Gillendale to just past the bridge on some kind of vessel that you had made (various rules were included here, such as excluding motors). Turns out that our team was a bit confused - we had some misleading information that it was a 100m dash and secondly, that dash ment it was kinda quick. It actually took us about 2 hours! (and the state of my hands attests that this is most certainly NOT due to a lack of paddling!)

Jason & Danne (2 med students currently at Broken Hill) had been to the tip to source the materials for our boat: a trampoline; 18 bright

yellow water drums; a thick & long length of rope; bits of wood; a metal garbage bin lid; and 6 blue circular plastic paint tub lids. Enthusiastic building started early on Saturday morning and resulted in this:

which looked like this in the water (which is exactly how the boys envisioned that it would look - it was meant to be partly submerged!!):

Other entries included the RFDS (who also did some flyovers of the races):

Woodstock boat from White Cliffs and the bath with gas cylinders attached (built by Brian, the local mechanic and only person who tested the seaworthiness of his vessel before the race):

All up, there was probably about 9 vessels and 8 people on tubes. It started to rain midway though the race but as we were already somewhat submerged, this didn't matter too much and although we didn't place, I think a generally fabulous time was had by everyone - this is us coming into the finish line:

I completely JIed on the med students boat so thanks very much for having me guys!

Was going to write a little bit about Wilcannia but I can't really do that without including a photo from the tea room balcony so will do in the next couple of days. Suffice to say that I think I'm going to like it here a lot, I think I'm going to learn a ridiculously hugely gigantically enormous amount, and, this doesn't constitute the deep end, it's more like a bottomless pit I think! Now off to study!

(and to the people who harassed me, I will be eaten alive when I try and find somewhere that the internet will work so consider yourselves placated ok?)