Camping at Tinaroo

This weekend just gone was a long weekend for the Labor Day public holiday on Monday (May Day). Rather than waste it around the home doing much needed jobs, we decided to go away to Tinaroo for the 2 nights. Trev & Kelli and Graham & Karina wanted to come with, so it had to be somewhere 2WD friendly. Since we had such a good time at Kauri Ck last year, we booked in there again.


We left early on Saturday morning in order to bags a good camp site. Even though there's only so many camp sites at Kauri Ck (and they all need to be pre-booked online), we had reason to believe that NPWS were overbooking the sites. Leaving early proved to be a wise decision, since there was only one campsite still available when we arrived at 9:30AM (despite us actually booking 3 sites!!!). People continued to roll in throughout the day, with many needing to set up camp on a spare bit of ground, instead of at a dedicated campsite with a level pad and a firepit. I know I'd be cranky at NPWS if I was one of those people.


After getting our site together, we strung a number of tarps together to provide some shelter from the expected rain. The BOM had been forcasting rain towards the end of last week, which hadn't yet arrived, but they were still promising would come. It eventually arrived Sunday midday, and stayed around all afternoon and evening. Not heavy rain - just very light, swirly, misty style rain. Just enough to make you damp, wet the grass and threaten to collapse our dodgily-errected tarps. Dodigly errected or not, we were glad we had them, and had taken the time to set them up in the dry.


As always, we ate like kings all weekend. The girls whipped up a camp oven roast on Saturday night, which fell prey to some over-zealous cooking, and ended up rather well done. At least the middle of the meat was edible, and that's more than I could say for the potatoes (shown above in their foil wrappings). Whilst disappointing, we know what we did wrong, and it was just laziness that caused us not to check it earlier. Sunday night Jess made up some of "Roothy's Cheesy Balls" from a 4WD Action DVD - essentially beef and pork mince rissoles, with a cube of cheese in the centre. They were the hit of the weekend, and well worth the messy preperation!


In amongst a lot of sitting around and not doing much, we managed to do a couple of easy bush walks around the campsite and into the rainforest.




Of course, being Tinaroo on a long weekend, there was more than a couple of ski boats out and about all weekend. As we later found out, the Wake Board Nationals were being hosted over at the Fong On Bay campsite, just across the lake from us. Thanks go to them for the fireworks display on Sunday night!


Special mention must be made of the little tinny with the bimini top in the photo above (it's the one on the right). Despite being a flat-nosed punt (IE, not a pointy nose, but a blunt, square nose) with the smallest outboard you could buy hung off the back, it didn't stop all weekend. It spent 3 days continually pulling little kids around the dam on tubes behind. When you got up in the morning, it was already working hard, and only pulled in at dusk when then light went - after which the ski gear was disconnected, and it headed back out with some fishing rods. Goes to show that you don't need a million bucks just to have a blast out on the water.

Despite the rain, we all had a great time. Was good just to get out of the house and away from all the home chores that usually consume a weekend. The rain even held off on Monday morning just long enough for the tents and tarps to dry out, and we could pack them away dry. No sooner had we got the cars packed and started to head home, than the rain started again. Good timing!

Next time we hope to venture a bit further away from the crowds. Trev might be (finally!!!) buying a dual cab Hilux this week, assuming it's RACQ report checks out. So we might be able to start venturing out to the more interesting places that require 4WD access! Fingers crossed on that one!

2009-05-05, Camping at Tinaroo

Camping at Kauri Ck, Tinaroo Dam

Friday the 18th was a public holiday here for the Cairns show. We had already been to the show earlier in the week, since Jess had to help set up and then man the Cath-Ed stall. So having already had our fill of expensive dagwood dogs, we had made plans to head up to Kauri Creek campground at Tinaroo dam. We were going with some popele we'd met through the myswag camper trailer forum (www.myswag.org) - Lance (Crazy Dog) and his wife Marg, and Paul (Teabag) and his wife Bec and their little girl Kira.

Tinaroo has a reputation for being a bit of a party spot on long weekends, but the campground we were at (there's 6 different ones sited around the edge of the lake), Kauri Ck, had a limited number of spots available, and you had to be pre-booked in. As a result, we shared the large area with about 8-10 other groups, and had plenty of space to ourselves. It was a lovely weekend away, despite the weather being a bit overcast, drizzley (rain overnight) and cool.

Even though it wasn't terribly hard rain, our tent didn't leak at all, so I'm reasonably happy with the waterproofing spray that we used on it. You may remember a couple of months back when we stayed at Lions Den, we were plagued by it leaking around the top frame. We had called into a local camping store and explained the problem, and they had sold us some spray-on canvas waterproofing agent, which seems to have done the trick nicely. Even still have half the can left, so I'll re-apply it in a year, and that should keep us nicely dry.

Anyway, we set out for Tinaroo early on the Friday morning, and had our pick of campsites when we arrived. Jess & I ended up with a spot up on top of the hill, looking down over the lake. The other's spots didn't have quite the view that we did, but they had bigger sections of leveled ground, which came in handy for setting up the campers. The view from our kitchen:

In case you're wondering about the Pathfinder's bonnet being up - it's not what you think! Tinaroo is home to native White Tailed Rats, and if you leave your bonnet down, then they get into the engine bay overnight, and chew through your electrical wires and rubber hoses & belts. The "cure" is to leave the bonnet up overnight. We all made sure that we'd done this, and had no problems, but we were probably the only group who had bothered - everyone else had left their bonnets down, and didn't seem to have any problems.

Paul & Bec's campsite:



Lance & Marg's setup:



In case you're wondering, yes - we are the odd ones out with our poor little tent compared to the trailers with their integrated water tanks + 12v pumps, hot showers, battery systems with LED lighting, etc. I was really expecting to be embarassed when we arrived to set up, thinking that we'd still be working away to set ourselves up whilst these guys were already sitting back with a beer. However we actually "won" the setup race, as it took both Lance and Paul a while to get their trailers level. Of course, packing up was a different story all together!

Lance bought a couple of crab pots along, and on Friday afternoon he went out in his canoe and put them in, using Black&Gold cat food as bait. Saturday morning, Paul & I took the canoe out to check the pots:







The result? After throwing back some of the little ones, we ended up with 5 good sized RedClaw:








We had reset the pots, and put them back down, moving one of the pots to a different spot, since it hadn't caught anything overnight. That pot was the unlucky one all weekend, and we couldn't catch a thing with it.

The rest of the day was spent just generally sitting around and wasting time, whilst enjoying the outdoors and the company. Lance had knocked up a batch of breadrolls in his camp oven which we had for lunch.








Saturday night we had a communal cookup, with Lance cooking up a pork roast in his camp oven. We used out oven to help do some of the veggies, and we ended up with a veritable feast. Many drinks were had, as we chatted our way to a reasonably late night.












After a late sleep-in on Sunday (no idea why...), we were greeted by some locals:






After retrieving the last couple of RedClaw from the pots, it was time for them to meet their destiny.
















Lunch time came around, which we shared (whether we wanted to or not) with a bunch of Kookaburras. Any food was OBVIOUSLY for them, despite whether it was on your plate, or, in my case, in my hand and half in my mouth.










Following lunch, we all started to pack up and break camp. We got stuck in and packed the mighty Pathfinder back to the gills and headed off early, as we wanted to spend a bit of time with Selena, Damo and Kayla on our way home.

All in all it was a very enjoyable and relaxing weekend, with heaps of good food and great company. I really enjoyed the location, and will definitely be heading back to Kauri Ck at some stage. It's only a bit over an hour away, and there's a couple of good bushwalks that we didn't get around to doing.

Many thanks go our to Lance & Marg, and Paul, Bec & Kira for a good weeekend away!

2008-07-20, Camping at Kauri Ck campsite @ Tinaroo Dam