This is the story of three days and nights spent canoeing down the Boyd River from Broadmeadows to Buccarumbi, NSW in May 2015.

The first part of this adventure, and possibly the most adventurous part of the trip, was finding the proposed camping spot at a place called Broadmeadows using this particularly dodgy map.

Or this even dodgier map showing the exact camping spot on a forestry track off the dirt track that is called the Old Grafton Road. The orange circle was where we had planned to camp but the green oval is approximately where we ended up camping at 1.15 am in the morning! All a little bit trickier than we first thought!

But let’s start the story from the beginning! One Thursday night in May (winter) 16 of us left my house at Nerang on the Gold Coast, Queensland, at 5.45 pm after work and travelled down to our proposed camping site, stopping for dinner and the usual reasons. 16 People squashed into 3 cars – two four wheel drives and a van.

We got to Buccarumbi in the dark and turned off onto the gravelled Old Grafton Road which follows very closely the Boyd River. Along the way is an old tunnel hewn out by hand back when this road was the main road to Glen Innes from Grafton.

With the help of Rob’s GPS we managed to find the very well hidden forestry track that would supposedly take us to Broadmeadows. There was some sort of warning sign about no vehicles past this point but by this time, we were in no mood to be turned around. As it was, the track vanished into swamp and long grass and the non 4WD vehicle in the convoy got a bit stuck.

So it was a quick retreat to a grassy ridgeline, throw up our tents and crash out at 1.15 am. We really had no idea exactly where we were camping but all would be revealed in the morning!

Only half an hour late, Lee turned up with his Troopie full of helpers and a trailer full of canoes and zoomed straight off to Broadmeadows. We all scrambled to follow and promptly got lost in the bush on various trails and river crossings. Eventually incredibly we all made it to the right spot, got sorted out with gear in canoes and Lee and his friends took our cars away to meet us in 3 days time. Here’s our parting group shot.

Aaaah, here comes the Love Boat. Steve and Jess riding the rapids. Steve has done this before but for Jess it was new.

Of course with Captain Steve in control she had nothing to fear – dry hair, don’t bother strapping down your Dry Sacs… for now. They got one dunking that day but the worst one was still to come.

Darren and Michael. They would have been the fastest thanks to Darren’s ergonomically shaped crash helmet but alas there was something very lacking in the design of their canoe.

Not only did it have lower sides than the rest of the canoes but it also had a number of rather large cracks and leaks which required fairly constant bailing. Lucky these two are fit!!

Angus and Mel also drew a bit of a short straw with canoes (8 canoes must have stretched Lee’s canoe stocks to the limits!) as their canoe was wide (good) but very low sides (bad) and totally open (bad each time you got hit with waves in the rapids).

They provided good entertainment later on when they got through some rapids but sunk in the flat bit from all the water they took on.  But that’s not today.  Today they stayed dry.

In the team category of “Definitely never Dry” was myself and Beau but also Robert and Emma. Robert and James last year had stayed completely dry the entire trip aside from a suicidal fun run down a waterfall. So Rob thought he was pretty good at this.

For some reason, he must have lost the “knack” because he and Emma were in three times on the first day – upside down, gear floating down the river. Like the shot of Beau and I, this is a relatively rare shot of Rob and Emma cruising along the right way up.

We pulled in on these sunny rocks for smoko which suited me as I was very cold from my previous dunking so good to get in the sun and out of the breeze.

A few more random photos of this first section of river in the afternoon…

The small matter of a barbed wire fence across the river at just the right height to garrotte us all.  Luckily Darren saw it in time, and knowing he would be in big trouble if he brought his son home literally without his head, he hopped out and held the wire up or us all to pass under!

So then we all had mooch carefully under it.

Finally at about 3 pm,  a nice paddock to camp in was spotted and we pulled in.  Not a moment too soon for me as we’d gone in the drink 3 times and I was frozen to the bone.  Rob and Emma had also gone over 3 times but their barrels had leaked so they had the extra task of drying out sleeping bags before it got dark (not much time for that in winter).  So we had a fire and a very pleasant night of camping was had by all.

And then we were all off again for the afternoon!  Cruising along the river, suddenly I see a girl by the river having what she might have thought was a private pee.  I said to Beau, “Well she hasn’t seen us!” and she pips back as she hurriedly leaps into the bushes, “Yes I have!”.

Then we saw lots of people.  Apparently the property by the river was being set up for an illegal Rave party with giant speakers and a platform and banners.  So that was all very interesting to paddle past!

But now we have some real entertainment – last of all down the rapids is the big open Alaskan style canoe.  Angus and Mel.  First of all they were too wide and got stuck and we thought they were goners but Angus surprised us all and they made it down without tipping it, he kept it straight but just the same it filled up with water and sank!!

Here’s the photo sequence but if you only watch one video on this site, you need to watch the video footage – too funny!!

Down they come and it’s still straight!  Mel is looking a LITTLE bit worried….

Soon though we hit more sets of rapids with varying results.  The surprise casualties this morning were Steve and Jess who had remained almost totally dry the whole trip.

There was a tricky little rapid with a low slung tree right on the last turn and weirdly the rest of us made it through and turned back to make sure the Love Boat was following but this is what we saw:

No boat!   Only Steve and Jess perched on rocks in the middle of the river looking nowhere near as chipper and happy as they usually are.   More shell shocked.  It seems that they had gone slightly too wide and got caught in the current under the low tree branch which sucked them under and flipped them so Jess was temporarily stuck upside under water and Steve was jammed under water beneath the branch and totally trapped.  With apparently a huge effort he managed to dislodge it all but it just shows that for all the fun we were having and even though it’s quite shallow, things can suddenly become quite serious very quickly.

So it was a bit of a rescue mission to float the canoe and find all their missing barrels and paddles and get back on our way again.

Steve and Jess soon got their mojo back and here they are easily negotiating a smaller rapid – not so much dry hair this time though!

And then it was back into the canoes and off to the next wipe out area!   And this is where we all got completely and totally annihilated!  The river split in two.  To the right it seemed to meander very quietly and vanish around a corner and to the left, the bulk of the water seemed to rush through the trees.

Nearly everyone by this stage was after some excitement (that doesn’t really include me and some other female crew members but nevermind) so 7 canoes went left and this is the last photo taken of this rapid – the approach. Goodbye Cruel World…

Looks innocuous enough…. In seconds it got incredibly fast, deep and narrow with the trees only inches above the water so no chance of a canoe going under them, let alone the incumbent humans. So we soon all ended up with canoes, paddles, barrels and humans all on top of each other, stuck up in trees, under water or shooting down river through this tunnel of undergrowth to goodness knows where.

Eventually through it all, nearly everything was spat out into a deep pool – humans, boats, barrels and paddles. One paddle never turned up and another was snapped in half. So there we all were on the river bank tipping out canoes, finding gear and trying to get ourselves together when around the corner come Mel and Angus, paddling quietly and calmly towards us – they had taken right hand route. Mel had taken one look at the rapids and decreed, “No way!” Good call, Mel!

Back to mooching along the river…

Until the Boyd River joined with the Nymboida River and suddenly there was the old Buccarumbi Bridge and finishing Point.  Lee turned up with all our cars and we started packing up.

Interestingly, there was a considerably more professional (boring?) group of school children getting a full day of safety training in the river before they did a two day canoe trip.  We tried to eavesdrop a bit – quite a lot of interesting safety information that might have been handy during some of our spills!