Last time I checked in I’d just gotten home from Portugal… and I think I had about one day on the couch before I was back on the road again. Straight down to Tassie.
I hadn’t been there in about 11 years, so it was pretty cool to get back down and see it properly. We did an adventure tour with the crew from West Coast Dirt Bike Tours and, honestly, it was unreal. Five days of riding, beaches, sand dunes, rivers, forests, pretty much everything you want, and hardly a soul around.
We had a good group too. I didn’t know everyone going in, but by the end of it we were all having a laugh like you’ve known each other for years. If things ever got worse back home with the apple farm and too many people in Vic, I was half joking saying I’d just load everything onto a truck and move it down there. That’s how good it is.
But Tassie didn’t last long… because pretty much as soon as I got back, it was straight into organising the ride day at the farm. And that was chaos. We had about two weeks to pull it all together with permits, entries, sponsors, merch, catering, track prep… everything. I reckon I spent five solid days just glued to the computer, going back and forth on emails trying to line everything up.
We ended up selling over 400 shirts for the event, which was unreal, but that also meant organising designs, printing, delivery of them and all that. Then there’s raffle prizes, auction items, dealing with sponsors… it was just massive. And then the weather turned it into a proper nightmare.
It rained all week leading into the event. At one point we had this massive thunderstorm come through Thursday night causing trees to come down and smash the tracks.
Friday was a mad scramble. We had to re-open the tracks, doze sections just to get them to dry out, grade the access road so 300–400 cars could even get in, put signage up… everything we didn’t want wrecked in the rain had to wait until the last minute.
I think we got to bed about 11 Friday night, back up at 4:30am Saturday, and straight into it again. Butsomehow… it all came together.
We had five tracks running: a kids track, grass track, family loop, and two senior loops. The dirt ended up perfect too. With that many bikes turning it over, it just tacked up unreal. Bit slimy in spots for the kids early on, but once it got going, it was mint.
And the best part was not a single injury.
For me, there wasn’t much riding going on as I was flat out all day signing stuff, taking photos, running around making sure everything was ticking over. I didn’t even eat until about 2pm when someone shoved a sausage in my hand.
The auction was huge too. We put up one of my Dakar jerseys and it went for $12.5K, which blew me away. That alone helped massively with covering costs and putting money back into the property.
We’ve had clubs already asking about running events again, but it’s not as simple as just saying yes. These days, with 300-plus riders, tracks get absolutely destroyed. You’re talking weeks of work and serious money just to bring them back.
We’ve always sort of done things for next to nothing, but between machinery, diesel, maintenance nowadays it adds up quick. So we’ve got to look at at least covering costs.
At the same time, we don’t want to overuse the place either. The farm’s been running events for decades because we’ve looked after it, and that’s not about to change. So we’ll probably do more ride days like this.
I’ve got Argentina coming up, then Erzberg on the Rally bike!
