Shauno scrabbling for every inch of
traction with the General Grabber X3s!04
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We spend a lot of time looking for campsites all around the
country and find some amazing spots. Often we fluke it or get
talking to a local who points out a good spot for us. Recently we have
been using YouCamp to find a lot of our campsites and I have to say
that this is the future of camping. YouCamp facilitates camping on
private properties and more often than not you will have a place all to
yourself and have the perfect bush camping. We have found many
great campsites when filming for 4WD Action with YouCamp and can’t
recommend it highly enough. Out of all the many times we have used
it we have only had one dud campsite, which was about an hour or so
trek west of Wauchope and turned out to be nothing like the
description and completely unsuitable for camping. However, that did
allow us to find a beaut little campsite just behind a pub. If you are
looking for a little campsite behind a great country pub, then it’s hard
to go past Long Flat, which is west of Port Macquarie on the southern
banks of the Hastings River. This is a little unknown gem to most
outside this area and a great place to go for a weekend. Set up camp
beside the river and make your way up to the little pub for a schooner
or even pub feed if you can’t be bothered firing the bbq up. Yep, we’re
big fans of country pub camps.2
We visited a very famous track just outside Wauchope called
‘Mouse Trap’. I’ve got no idea how it got that name, but after
heavy rain the night before we had no chance of making it to the top
on our own steam. The good news was that while I had to almost
winch from bottom to top, so did Jock in his beast of a HiLux. That
made me feel a lot better! Apparently in the dry, this is a very doable
track with the right line. In the wet, it didn’t matter how many lockers
or how big your tyres were, there was zero traction.3
The best news about all of the panel damage I sustained was that
I needed to do something about Sooty before the next trip. She
was looking very banged up with panel damage on just about every
guard, flares were almost all missing and it was overall looking very
beaten up. You see, it only takes one scratch or a dent every trip and
fast forward 18 months and one of our rigs can look very second
hand. So after this trip it was straight to Custom RV where Darren
stripped the old girl back and we gave her a birthday with a new lick
of Raptor Coating and resprayed all of the bar work. Sooty looks like
a brand new 80 Series... so long as you don’t smell the interior!4
On the last day of filming we got a bit of local knowledge of some
tracks not far off the highway from Port. Jocko pointed us in the
direction of Queen’s Lake and what we found was a super tough hill
climb that was mega dusty, rutted with some huge rock steps thrown
in. Our plan was to film a couple of tracks in the area, but we ended
up spending most of the day on just that one hill climb to get up to
the fire tower. It was that sort of terrain where it was full of shale and
large loose rocks and traction was almost non-existent. When one of
the boys blew a CV, it was a mega winch fest. Fun times!5
You might think that when we are filming we have everything
planned out and know exactly what our next move is going to be.
This is nowhere near the truth and will constantly change our
direction, which I think is a good thing. We seem to create a better
adventure when we play it by ear a little. This happened when we got
to the fire tower at Queen’s Lake and decided we would head back to
the coast because we could see the ocean from the viewpoint and it
looked very inviting.5 THINGS YOU DIDN’T SEE ON CAMERA