Trekking across the salt flats

An interesting and unexpected kind of day.

We set out from Woodside Beach in the morning intending to head up to Sale and right around the outside of Lake Wellington. However, a swift bit of googling by Tiger threw up the possibility of heading up the coast and getting a boat ride across to the mainland. This knocked a day off our journey - but could we find a boat?

We called a boat hire company but they couldn’t help us, but they gave us the number of Rob Ashworth, skipper of the Lady Jodie, a 35 foot boat. We gave him a ring and soon came up with a plan for him to get us across the water.

Next challenge was coming up the ocean side path. It was fine to start with but started degrading into soft sand, send us flying on occasions. It slowed us to walking pace - mainly because we were walking most of the time.

In the end Tiger did a quick scouting exhibition and found we were just next to a large salt flat. It looked ok to cross, and at just 1.5km wide, it was going to be quicker than carrying on along the oceanside track.

Crossing the salt flat was pretty weird though. Problems like quicksand or the tide coming in were occurring to us, but everything looked pretty cool, and we made it across.

That left us 20km ride into Loch Sport, which we were pleased to find had a Foodworks - the first supermarket we’d seen for two days.