I Used a Fat Bike & Packraft to Travel 200km Along NSW’s Northern Coastline

Inspired by his love of the absurd and enabled by a garage full of gear, Jonathan embarked upon a four-day sea-and-sand multisport tour.

We Are Explorers acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the Countries on which these adventures take place, who have occupied and cared for these lands, waters, and their inhabitants for thousands of years. We pay our respects to them and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.

Shafts of dawn light illuminated two trawlers returning from sea as I paddled across the Clarence River and pulled up on the sand by the Iluka Ocean Rescue building.

I reassembled my fat bike, deflated my packraft, broke down my paddle, and swapped my PFD for a helmet. Strapping my paddling gear to the rear rack of the bike, I said to myself, ‘One water crossing and 3.5km done, only eight crossings and 200km to go’.

My goal was to travel from my parents’ house in Yamba in Northern NSW to my sister’s in Currumbin in South East QLD, riding along the beach wherever possible and rafting across the rivers and creeks on the way.

I’d given myself four days, with stops at Evans Head, Lennox Head, and Wooyung Beach, and I had a niggling concern that the trip was too easy to count as a ‘real adventure’.

Read more: Remember to Leave No Trace

Sea, Sand, and Satellite Images

This trip came about thanks to some annual leave that I had to take by the end of October, and me being a big fan of slightly absurd adventures. With a couple of weeks of free time on my hands and a garage brimming with gear, it was time to cook up an adventure.

I quickly decided on a bikerafting trip, and while trying to piece together a route near home in the Blue Mountains, I was struck by inspiration to bikeraft the state’s northernmost beaches.

A few hours of zooming in on satellite images and consulting tide charts told me two things: first, that my initial idea of a pure ‘sea and sand’ trip where I would paddle around the headlands was too weather-dependent and sketchy; and second that I had a five-day window when low daytime tides would facilitate riding the beaches.

Read more: How to Stay Safe at the Beach

The Map is Not the Terrain

I grew up in the Clarence Valley, but my personal familiarity with most of the route I’d planned was limited to drawing lines on maps. Riding north from Iluka Ocean Rescue, I quickly found that not all of my planned route would work out, as the Iluka breakwall proved to be unrideable and I instead hike-a-biked through the scrubland behind the dunes.

Back on route I was treated to my first proper taste of beach riding; 3.5km of hard-packed sand, a gentle wind at my back, the sun glinting off the choppy surf, and only birds for company. My fat tyres floated over the sand with a pleasing whir and it was with little effort that I made good time to the first headland.

From the satellite images it’d been difficult to tell whether I’d be able to scoot around the rock shelf at the front of the headland or would need to go over. Choosing to attempt the former, I soon found myself on a rocky shore repeatedly deadlifting my heavily laden bike from boulder to boulder. I resolved to go over subsequent headlands unless the rock shelf was obviously rideable.

Read more: Staying Safe on Coastal Rock Platforms

A friend once told me he’d never seen someone put so much effort into being lazy as I do, and a few headlands later that tendency played out.

A storm had felled hundreds of trees just north of Woody Head, blocking the beach for 750m. Rather than go to the bother of inflating my raft to paddle around, I decided to ride around the outstretched branches of the trees into the water. A holidaying family paused their beach stroll to watch as I battled through, making surprisingly good progress until a rogue wave knocked me off the bike.

Speeding Tickets and Unexploded Ordnances

The day before I started my ride, my Dad asked me whether I was riding ‘through the bombing range’. Not knowing what he was talking about, I scoured the internet and learned about the Evans Head Air Weapons Range, which is off-limits to the public due to ‘potential unexploded ordnance’.

From the scant details that I could find it seemed that the beach was part of the exclusion zone, so I mapped out a 20km inland detour via the small town of Woodburn.

It’s funny how memory layers on top of experience. On this trip, Woodburn was just part of a necessary detour and a chance to grab a mint chocolate ice cream from the servo. But 25 years ago, before it was bypassed, it was an infamous speed trap where my high school girlfriend got a speeding ticket and cried in the car.

As I rode past the cane fields on the way out of town, I reflected on the things that have changed and stayed the same since my childhood in the area, until a very persistent magpie swooped me and broke through my reverie.

Windy Woes

In planning this tour I’d taken into account the tide charts and my predicted speed on various terrain, but I’d failed to consider the wind. A local told me mid-tour that it always blows a northerly in the afternoon at this time of year, and indeed no matter how calm the mornings were, by lunchtime I’d be riding head-on into rather assertive headwinds.

I reached a low point at mid-afternoon of day three, with gusty conditions cutting my speed down to an ennui-inducing 6km/h. Standing up for a burst of effort, my wired headphones became tangled around my seat and broke, rendering me tuneless for the rest of the trip.

Wind was also the antagonist for the sketchiest moment of the trip. As I approached the crossing of the Richmond River at Ballina, I stopped to chat with two guys getting ready to go windsurfing. They recommended that my safest option would be to take a 400m paddle to a small beach due west, from which I could access the Missingham Bridge.

While a tempting suggestion, I decided that’d be a violation of my self-imposed rules and told them that I’d need to take the 900m crossing northwards. Wishing me luck, they warned me about a submerged rock wall that my route would take me directly over.

It was an emotional crossing. As I passed over the rock wall, I used my paddle to check for depth in the hope of avoiding any sharp rocks that might lead to a rapid unplanned deflation, and once I was out from the protection of the headland, I had to aim my packraft north-east in a vain effort to counteract the westward pressure of the wind.

Halfway across I could see that I’d been pushed off course of my planned landing spot, and it was with a fair amount of effort that I managed to land on my backup beach with 10m to spare. I sat stunned on the beach for a while, then went to the nearby takeaway joint for an emotional support rocky road ice cream.

An Adventure Worth Destroying Your Drivetrain For

On paper, an average of 50km a day had seemed like a pretty cruisy little adventure, but I underestimated how tough the conditions would be on both me and my gear.

Servicing my bike after arriving at camp on day two, I found that the reason I’d been so slow that afternoon was that the salt water had caused my front brake to seize in a slightly engaged position. I used my multi-tool to pry the calipers apart and wrapped the lever in duct tape as a reminder not to use the front brake except in an emergency.

By halfway through day three, my front derailleur no longer worked; my panniers were held together by twine, duct tape, and Voile straps; and I’d had to use my subpar sewing skills to stitch my adventure sandals back together.

I had patches of sunburn on my right wrist and calf from hours in the morning sun. As I ate my dinner one night, a magpie dropped a seed pod into my tartare sauce. I suspect it was working in cahoots with the bush turkeys who ran in to grab a chip while I was distracted.

An imminent storm loomed overhead as my raft slid onto the beach at Currumbin Creek. I was worn out but jubilant, not only because I’d achieved my goal but because of the little moments along the way.

I’d rested in driftwood shelters and swam in the evening ocean, chatted with beachgoers about the absurdity of my endeavour, and been the subject of confused excitement from kids as I waded across Cudgera Creek.

There’d even been an upside to destroying my headphones when I heard the crunching of tiny rocks embedded in the sand as I rode over them, like putting my ear right up to a bowl of Rice Bubbles.