08/03/26 Goolwa to Finniss

I officially started (again) at the mouth of the Murray. I even found a sign to make it all legitimate. 

Roger dropped me off and headed back to Goolwa to watch all the sail boats come in to Goolwa on the return leg of the Goolwa-Milang-Goolwa Regatta. Unlike the dash-for-cash, they were really racing. He was happy.

Pedaling an unloaded bicycle and with a stiff tailwind, I zig-zagged across Hindmarsh Island, first beside the Mundoo Channel and then past salt pans and derelict windmills. 

Egret at the Mundoo Channel boat ramp.

I stopped at the Charles Sturt cairn in the middle of the Island. It was around here that Charles Sturt and Collett Barker finally glimpsed the waters of Encounter Bay, thus completing their exploration to find the mouth of the Murray. Things didn't end well for Collett in 1831 though: he swam the mouth of the river to the Coorong and was promptly speared by the locals who mistook him for a marauding seal hunter who had been raping local women. Sadly, Collett himself was known for recognising and respecting the local indigenous persons wherever he was posted.

From there it was downhill to the northern shore of Hindmarsh Island, sheltered from the southerly wind and looking over the channel to Goolwa North. This being the Sunday of a long weekend, the holiday houses were all occupied with retirees sitting comfortably on their verandahs and sipping coffee. I waved at them. They waved back. No one offered me coffee so I continued trundling, coffee-less, along the water front. Everyone had mowed neat little paths through the reed beds to their tinnie/cabin cruiser/houseboat mooring, the size of the holiday house closely correlated to the size of the boat.

I stopped at the top of the Hindmarsh Bridge to take a last picture of the Oscar W with the Cockle Train behind, and had a rather miserly pastie for lunch in Goolwa. Roger met me down at the wharf and gave me a bag of lollies as a treat, which was nice of him. He'd even eaten some himself, purely for quality control. He's thoughtful like that.

Bye Oscar W. Again.

I won't talk about the traffic on the busy road out of Goolwa. People with boats and caravans really needed to figure out how wide they were so they didn't frighten poor cyclists out on the road. If they had used their rear vision mirrors they would have seen the stern looks that I gave them. I had to stop and take photos of hay bales, just to calm my nerves. 

Then I stopped again in Currency Creek where an old tree beside the vineyards just begged to be sat upon. Currency Creek was once considered as the site for SA's capital, back when everyone had fanciful thoughts of the Murray Mouth being navigable. In the end Port Adelaide won out, despite its ferocious mosquitoes and soul-sucking swamps, and Currency Creek got left alone. Now it's just a cellar door, a Community Hall, and a RFS base. And a comfortable tree.

The road to Finnis was pleasurably quiet, devoid of caravans/boats and with pleasant little detours into waterways. Before you could say 'pedal slowly up the last hill' I was chilling at the Finnis General Store and waiting for my lift back to salubrious accommodation above the creek in Strathalbyn.

First days don't get much better than this.