Previous Activations: 5
Height: 571m
Points: 2
Snakes: 1
Tesla battery used: 34%
Ferries: 2
SOTA: https://sotl.as/summits/VK7/SC-017
POTA: https://pota.app/#/park/VK-6279
WWFF: yeah, naah
I planned to do this on a Wednesday but Jim VK7JDZ contacted me to say he was doing two summits in VK3 on Tuesday so I bought things forward a day and left earlier than intended to make my summit around the same time as Jim’s first. It took two hours to drive from home at Kingston to the start of the track on Bruny Island. I arrived at the ferry on the Kettering side 20 mins before the next boarding so patiently waited in the queue. I could see the boat filling quickly so made sure I was really close to the car in front as we slowly drove towards the ferry in the hope the worker lady who seemed to be paying my car a lot attention would let me on. It worked (in my head) as I was the last car to board, those behind me having to wait for the next trip.
It took 20 minutes on the $50 ferry during which I discovered the map in a Tesla doesn’t update your position when it knows the wheels aren’t turning. I was shown at Kettering until I drove off the ferry on Bruny. The traffic was terrible as there’s a big queue of cars that all leave the ferry at the same time and there were tourists doing two miles a fortnight. I swear they must have replaced their speedo with a calendar. I headed towards Adventure Bay then turned right onto Coolangatta Road. This is gravel and a short distance from the bitumen there’s a sign that says “End of Council maintained road”. That’s a sure fire warning that a crappy track lies ahead. It was pretty rough but entirely doable in a 2WD. Not sure about winter when it would be a be bit muddy though. I had come at this from the other end once before and feel it was probably a longer drive from that direction.
This is now one of my favorite short walks. It was about 30 minutes from the carpark to the summit on a steady incline the whole way. No real steep bits and none of those horrible downhill bits that I hate on the way to a summit. It starts off a bit spooky enclosed by the canopy with beautiful mossy green rocks and tree roots everywhere then continues like that pretty much all the way to the top. There’s a small communications hut with an ugly mobile phone style tower in an opening at the summit. There’s no view at all, you are surrounded by scrub and trees.
I setup on an old concrete pad in the clearing as that felt like the safest place. I hadn’t seen any snakes on the walk up but the clearing was open and dry and felt very snakey. I could at least see them coming for me here. Unfortunately I had to walk through the scrub to setup the antenna and pole. I got that done without incident then something caught my eye. There was a stinky little nope rope a couple of meter’s off the pad I was setup on the whole time. I watched him for a bit but he seemed to be chilling in the sun so I told him I’d leave him alone if he did me the same curtesy.
The going was tough initially on the radio. I struggled for any contacts then they started to flood in. Jim’s GPS had sent him on a wild journey over private property so it was looking like our S2S was a bust. I worked 10 on 40m including an unexpected summit to summit with Steve VK3KTT on Mt Alexander VK3/VN-016 south of Bendigo in Victoria. I was getting some pretty bad signal reports which I just put down to conditions. I changed to 20m and worked another 8 including a ZL and another S2S in the new UTC day with Steve. I had my four band portable EFHW in the pack so decided to put that up and give some points to the chasers participating in the 2024 SOTA 10M challenge. It was terrible. I couldn’t hear anyone and no one could hear me. Total waste of time. Even the snake looked disappointed. My setup was compromised as I usually put the feed point at the top of the pole in a sloper configuration but had forgotten to bring the coax to allow me to do that. The feed point was almost on the ground which wouldn’t have helped. This is when I realised I had been operating on only 5 watts the entire time. The firmware upgrade process for my FX-4CR radio includes a step where you re calibrate the output power at 5w on all bands. I hadn’t set them back to 20w. OMG!!! I gave up at this point and packed up all the gear. It was very hot in the open sun on the concrete pad.
From the summit clearing there’s a hard to spot track off to the right that takes you to a lookout rock. Well worth the visit and it was further away from the death noodle. I’m sure he was the only one there……
I met an older gentleman with his adult son and daughter in law at the lookout and had a bit of a chat. On my walk back down I stumbled upon the older gentleman’s wife. She had given up on the walk and done a beautiful art work in the middle of the track. She told me they often leave art like this on tracks when they go walking knowing that it will be gone in a day or two but it seemed like a lovely thing to me so after walking off I went back up the hill to take a photo.
VK7ID 