So on the Sunday before camp I was out most of the day buying gear for my trip to Nepal (which is in June). So when I got home I couldn't be bothered packing. I wrote a list before I went to bed, and got up early and packed. Guess what this means? I got to school and realised I forgot my bowl and my cutlery
It was okay though, I told my teacher and he got me to raid the staff kitchen, turns out one other student forgot as well but we both 'borrowed' stuff so that was fine.
So the camp was a canoeing trip from Yarrawonga to Cobram. On Monday we got to Yarrawonga and went to have a look at the weir. Whilst I know that there is lots of Carp in the Murray river it was strange seeing at lest 10 of them in such a small area. We met with our instructors there. (my outdoor ed teacher came, as well as another staff member from school and there were 2 canoeing instructors from Rubicon).
We chatted for a bit and then we drove to the area where we were going to stay. Of course we couldn't drive to our sleeping area, so we had to carry all of our gear and the canoes a few hundred metres.
I didn't think that we were going to go canoeing on Monday, but we did! We didn't travel anywhere, we just got used to how they worked and steering. At one point we played a game where we had to follow the instructor around exactly, and he swerved around lots of obstacles. My canoe partner and I are competitive people, we were alternating for first and second most of the time, but then we went around a log and leaned a bit too far and
we were the first to capsise. Of course we insisted that the instructor had asked us to demonstrate. After that we all deliberately flipped our canoes and had to practice pulling the flipped canoe over other canoes, turning it, then pushing it back into the water. Then came the hard part, getting back into the canoe. I ended up doing 4 rescues because both my friend, and our teacher managed to flip their canoe whilst they were trying to get back in.
After we finished playing in the canoes we decided to go for a swim, so we went across the river and explored NSW. Unfortunately it started to get dark so we had to come back and make dinner. Due to the lack of room in the canoes, all 14 students were sleeping on a tarp (or under if it rained, which it didn't) so we were all crowded there in our sleeping bags, in the open air. Guess what else I forgot? Mozzie repellent. Luckily other people let me use theirs so I (mostly) survived.
That was the last time we saw a real toilet. By real toilet I mean a drop toilet. Every day after that we had to dig a hole. We finally saw a proper toilet again when we got into Cobram at 11pm on Thursday night.
In the morning we jumped in our canoes and headed out. I was at the back of the canoe so I got to steer. It was great fun
We mucked around a fair bit. I was at the front of the group most of the time, we had to stop at one point because some of the people at the back had decided they wanted a swim. There was only like 4 boats at the front, we stopped at a sandy area, and there was a sand dune and a couple of people in the front group decided to run down it and jump in the water and a few of us stayed in the boats. Everyone else caught up and stopped right on the sand dune and they all ended up getting out too. I kinda wish I had, it looked fun, but at the time they were just going to run down and then come back but they ended up staying a while.
We did a really bad job of navigating, we ended up stopping at a beach because it had a rope swing (I say beach, i really mean a sandy area on the edge of the river). Our teachers advised us against going on the rope swing because they could not be sure it was safe but some people went anyway.
We emptied out the canoes and sorted our food into breakfast/lunch/dinner so we could get to it easier. We were sent off to have 'solo time' whilst the teachers started making dinner. It was supposed to go for half an hour, but i fell asleep for almost 2 hours (oops). By the time I woke up dinner was almost ready so we ate and then split up into our study groups (there were 3 groups, water/land management & policy; Indigenous relationships; biodiversity). I was in the Indigenous relationships group, we were the smallest group (there was 3 of us). It was really good though. One the the canoe instructors is aboriginal so we asked him lots of questions and I learnt a lot
Wednesday was much the same. It was super hot the whole week but it was actually pretty comfortable on the water, if we got warm we just splashed ourselves (and each other) to cool off. We decided to take a short cut at one point (it was a narrower area that effectively cut the corner. We turned in and the current picked up. We didn't know that there was a log across most of the river, the first boat got passed it (about a 1m gap). Every canoe after that hit it because we were too close together to stop. We all got some emergency instructions yelled at us, grab the log, lean into it, don't let your canoe flip. After we had all pulled ourselves around it we got out and went to look at it from the river bank. It turns out that there was actually two channels and the other one had a log entirely blocking it! We got told a story about a time one of our canoeing instructors was going down the river with a friend and they hit a log and his friend went under, they were both fine but it was scary. We asked about what to do if we went under. Essentially it was curl into a ball (smallest possible surface area) and hope that there was enough room under the log so that you got pushed through.
We had really strong winds on wednesday so we stopped for a bit and went for a swim, except we really just walked upstream and floated down around the bend a few times. We had a whole lot of fun attempting to push our teacher under and playing keepings off with his cap (we kind of cheated by putting it down the front of girls life jackets so he couldn't try and get it off us haha). We also played a game called Mr. President which is even more fun in water than it is on land. Basically someone puts there finger to their ear (like as if you were a secret service agent with an earpiece), when you see someone doing it you copy them, when there's only one person who hasn't done it everyone runs and tackles them and yells 'get down Mr. President'. We played it on a different camp last year and told everyone except our teacher, would definitely recommend if your teacher won't murder you for it.
We played another game throughout the week, it wasn't really a game. It's called silly salmon, basically whenever someone put their hands together and wobbled them (if that makes any sense) you had to run to the water and jump in (like flopping around in the air and landing sideways). You had to do it regardless of if you were already dry, but some people refused haha.
On Thursday we had to get to a beach called twin nobs by 2:30 to meet some people from Parks Vic who were going to talk to us. Along the way we were collecting sticks because we were planning on making a raft between two canoes. We hit a jackpot at our lunch site when we found a bunch of wooden pallets that someone else had used as a raft. We re-purposed them and tied two of them in between two canoes. I was in one of those canoes and it was a lot of fun when a boat went past, its wake couldn't tip us over, so we stood us and 'surfed'. Of course we also had people jumping off the back of the raft whilst we were canoeing
Originally we were going to stay at twin nobs for the night and then get up early to go to Cobram. Naturally we had to be a bit more adventurous, so we decided to stay at twin nobs for dinner and then leave about 8 and paddle in the dark to Cobram. It was absolutely amazing paddling in the dark, it was a full moon that night too! I can't describe how amazing it was and I'm very happy we got to do that. Whilst at twin nobs someone managed to lose our hygiene kit (which had our toilet paper in it!) Before we knew that we had lost it one of the students was going to show our teacher where the hole was so me and another student tagged along so we could see where it was. The kid led us along and he keeps going 'oh they dug it ages away' we ended up running for a bit and then our teacher goes 'is this a joke' and the kid goes 'yeah'...turns out it was like 20m from camp but we had run like 800m lol. It was very very funny and I'm surprised he believed it or as long as he did.
We got into Cobram about 11pm...and guess what? There was no camping at that beach. We actually knew that before we left but we did it anyway haha. There were sprinklers across most of the grassy area so we had to squash ourselves in the corner nearest the car park (that was empty except our bus). We struggled to stay awake as we emptied our canoes, and then we got to use a real toilet! It flushed and everything! Despite how tired we all were, we stayed up until 1 ish talking and eating leftover snacks...and I hid in my sleeping bag and browsed AN on my phone that I totally didn't bring haha. The next morning I was up first and everyone else was a little sleepy. We packed up and I scrubbed lots of pots and my hands turned a colour I like to call Trangia Black. For those who don't know a trangia is a portable stove sort of thing. The pots go very, very black on the bottom..and it's greasy and stayed on my hands for most of the weekend despite repeated scrubbing.
Definitely an awesome camp