Five months to go from the 1st of December. Time is starting to move more quickly now, but so are we, we hope.
Pete has run out of bore water
at his farm and has been busy setting up a solar powered
pump to deliver water from the river that runs along his boundary. This
has required extensive research and planning, not to mention preparing the
ground and designing and building the infrastructure for a system to lift water
over 300' and just over 1km.
But in between the travails of life Pete has maintained a training schedule of three rides around the lake per week and at least one ride of 40-80kms on weekends, mostly on the Kona road bike, not the Randonneur. Pete has also started to load up his Randonneur with panniers and ride around getting used to the extra effort required for a loaded bike.
Pete has settled on a 4 pannier configuration for the trip up the east coast, and intends to have his BoB trailer sent up to Cairns for the more remote riding along the top end, which will require up to 20 litres of water to be carried on certain stages. With two large rear panniers, and two small front panniers, together with the tent carried on the rear rack, and a front handlebar pack for items close at hand, Pete should have enough on board storage to travel through the populated sections of the trip.
It's
now the middle of December and I'm getting an idea of how I need to configure
the bike and trailer. As a test I got together everything I thought I
would conceivably want to take and packed them into the various bags available.
The trailer bag was filled with the camping gear, tent, sleeping bag, sleeping
mat, cookset, cutlery and plates, first aid kit, spare shoes, road atlas etc.
Total weight around 9kg, but close to capacity.
One rear pannier was filled with clothing, basically just 2 nicks, 2 shorts, 2 t shirts, one long sleeved shirt, one light jacket, 4 sets of underwear, trackie daks, spray jacket and that's about it. The other rear pannier was filled with food, with cereal rice and pasta and some packets of this and that, filled up fairly quickly.
On the rear rack is an Arkel tail Rider, which will contain my digital SLR and accessories, as well as some of the items I will want instant and constant access to. I also have a Topeak Tour Guide handlebar bag which will contain the video camera that I will be using to record the trip as we ride along (and therefore needs to be where I can use it while riding), as well as all the items I will want to access constantly such as sunglasses, maps, sunscreen, phone and the like.
Finally, I loaded up one front pannier with all the electronic items I expect to take, battery chargers for the video and still cameras, spare tapes, wide angle lens, rechargeable batteries, external hard drive and the like. Altogether the paraphenalia required to record the trip in reasonable fashion will fill up half the pannier. I may yet decide to distribute the items in the trailer but as part of a test ride it had no real impact on the bike's handling or performance.
Altogether what you see in the photos above weighed in at 22kg according to my bathroom scales. Add the 6kg for the trailer and it looks like I'm likely to be starting out with 25-28kg of gear to haul around. It sounds a lot but it only represents about an additional 25% over the weight of me and the bike together. On the flat and anywhere tending downhill there's almost no difference in average speed, but for any climb the difference is quite noticeable. At a guess I would say that for most uphill gradients greater than 2%, the speed penalty is 30-40%. However over an average day's ride of 60km undulating, I expect to average 18km/hr, compared to 22-25km/hr that I would average on a bare road bike.
So far in December I haven't done any long rides, but most days I'll ride between 12 and 40km, with and without heavy loads, which is ample to keep the muscles in shape. An indication of how the training is working was on a ride to Woden and backearly this month. A year ago I considered the climb up Hindmarsh Drive to be a 'hard' climb and I would come over the top pretty buggared. This time I sailed up the climb and kept thinking the roads people must have done something to the gradient, because it was quite an easy climb.