Last night wrap-up
Yesterday, after having written the second day's blog entry, we played around skywatching for the rest of the night.
As always, the Southern Cross (Crux) is the quickest constellation to find. Then we worked up to the two stars above (supposedly part of a camel). Also tried to find the other star that the southern cross points to that somewhere along the line they form marks the southern pole rotational axis.
We saw what turned out to be an airplane (could make out the white, red, and green blinking nav lights) that slowly disappeared into the horizon, but along the way did the “sudden right angle turns” optical effect. This phenomenon is so definitely visible that there is no question what the ufo people are seeing. When I get time, I should go research the cause of this effect. My guess is that it is some combination of atmospheric disturbance and some trick where your eyes lose any other point of reference and start freely rolling about, searching for a reference frame.
Mars burns very brightly, as it will the whole trip. Lots of bickering over star descriptions, with one book using ordinal numbering (which is ludicorous) and the other using sgtrange greek lettering and no real name for the stars.
So eventually we went off to bed. Ling was irate over my lack of tooth-brushing. Matt lasted about half a hour in our tent before the sensation of being trapped in a nylon coffin w/ a spastic, bickering husband-and-wife team overwhelmed him. For that night and all further nights he slept on the folded-down seats of a LandCruiser.
I slept fine – if anything it was too warm. Next morning woke up, Matt had gone off for a walk. Fussed around for a while and eventually packed up and headed off to finish the rest of the Finke Race Course.
Destroying the KAP Rig
After another hour+ of slow driving, we got to the Bundoooma railroad ruins, formerly a watering waypoint oasis for the Ghan train.
Took an hour to set up the KAP rig, a chronically slow process. In that time a convoy of railroad enhusiasts showed up along the track. In each car was a tiny 1.5hp rail car which they run on old lines for fun. They didn’t stay long enough to see us launch the rig. (which is good, we hate company)
We got the rig up, finished a half-roll film that was left in the camera from Norway (unfortunately 200ASA print film) and then unwound the string spool, rewound it, and relaunched.
The wind was damn strong. It was a struggle to control the kite. As we were walking the kite around to different vantages, Matt was noticing sudden pan control problems, and that he was seeing the picavet in the video. This is wrong.
I was busy concentrating on keeping the kite under control when Dad said, “oh no! it fell!” Staring around in confusion for a moment, I saw on a distant dune the silver body of the kap rig, and up in the air, nothing but the picavet. This was a 200+ foot fall.
We brought down the kite and Matt recovered the frig. The aluminum chassis was severely racked, and it was immediately obvious that the pan mechansim bolt had worked itself free -- - essentially unscrewing itself in the sky. nauseating.
The Yashica camera is toast. The KAP rig chassis is twisted too. The camera took the last fall (at Death Valley) ok, but this plunge was too much. I tried to repair it, but I couldn’t undo some of the tiny screws without tearing their heads out, so I gave up. A repair shop in Singapore will have to treat the camera.
Prognosis? This is repairable … we probably can bend back the kap chassis, rebolt it into the picavet, put some locktite on the bolt that worked free. For a camera, we’ll use Matt’s Olympus, which will be fine. But it certainly cast a pall over the afternoon…. two+ hours spent and we had hardly even warmed up the camera before it all came crashing down.
Whooping the Finke
After that disappointment, we loaded the cars and headed off. After Bundooma, the roads got realllly tough. Whoop after whoop after whoop.
A "whoop"? It’s just undualating road bed about the frequency length and amplitude of a car. up down up down up down. You can’t go fast at all on them (20kmh or often less), otherwise it throws the contents of the car all over the place.
Even then, trying to avoid the punishment for speeding, the whoops' variation is enough that despite driving at what appears to be safe levels, you still get a rogue, resonant launch every tenth hump. These freak mini-crashes desertroyed a foam cooler after about twenty minutes of driving and also exploded two boxes of UHT milk, which spilled over the car, ruining a star atlas, and leaving an awful fucking stink that stays with us three days later.
The cars and bikes that come through this same section average 100khm! That's five+ times faster than we could cover it. The buggies have 26" suspensions with enormous 44" wheels. This combo allows the buggies to compartively float their bodies across all the whoops, their suspension arms taking all the movement. Madness!
You drive though this set of dunes for a long time until you come to a plain. It gradually gets better from there, although the course and its signage got a bit confusing. For short periods we were back on the main Finke/southern road, but I think we held the course properly. Only once along the route did I get off the course. Ling and I were barrelling along at 90kmh wondering where Matt and my parents were behind us. They were on the whoops, doing 5kmh wondering how we were managing to drive so maniacally in a Landcruiser identical to theirs.
Managed to get Oziexplorer ‘moving map’ working during this leg. It’s not particularly nice or easy to use in moving car. I could imagine vastly more usable systems. It’s a shame Oziexplorer is not Open Source, then we could redesign it properly. You’d probably want the thing, groan, to be run inside Linux, so that you could have a very robust, minimal on-board computer managing things.
Finishing the Finke
Anway, finishing the Finke route took the better part of the day. It was obvious by the afternoon that we were not going to make it to Mt. Dare. We crossed the Finke finish line at around 1645pm and headed out on the west-east road towards Old Andado Homestead.
Halfway between Finke and New Crown we found a camp site. It wasn’t so nice – just parked a kilometer off the road in a cattle pasture. Of course, in that stretch of road between Finke and New Crown, that’s all there is. So tough luck.
We made a minimal camp compared to the night before … no campfire, no charcoal pits. Dinner was italian sausage and onions, with the ubiquitous baked beans and peas&corn.
It was exceptionally dark and we kept having bands of low-hanging clouds sweepover us. Everything was a bit glum, although not horrible. Mom and Dad listened to a book-on-tape about the Wright Brothers “read by Boyd Atkins” and the three of us stood in the dark making wisecracks and talking shit.
We went off to bed but didn’t even bother climbing into sleeping bags – it was hot that night. Probably still in the 70s. Ling cajoled me into putting up the rainfly, which seemed unecessary, but it was a good idea befcause a few hours later we had some intermittent rain, although it didn’t even show in the ground the next day.
We agreed that night to make it a morning speed camp so that we could dash to the comparative comfort of the Mt. Dare homestead early morning of Day 4. I slept fine, but I think all night the Parentals were worried a freak rain would come, flooding the creeks, and trapping us in this cattle heath. No such luck.