As the weather forecast for Monday was also looking pretty grim I had a feeling it was going to be a tough session. But as ever I was desperate to get out on the bank and determined to put my day off to good use, I arrived at the lake at 9:30am (after a detour home to pick up my forgotten brolly) to find it deserted. As with previous sessions, the wind was hacking down towards the far end so I decided to hedge my bets and start in trusty swim 25 which (so far) had been doing me loads of bites.

I stuck with the same tactics as before (helicopter rig with a yellow wafter dumbbell on one rod and a feeder rod with corn on the 2nd rod) and had a few early fish on the feeder before the bites dried up around 11ish.

Rather than move (it was raining hard by this point) I decided to ring the changes and try some different baits. Bread is a great winter bait and having saved some slices from the liquidised bag I'd made up for the feeder I decided to try popped up bread discs and bread boiles for a while. I sat on my hands allowing 20 minutes for each rod but after no signs, it was time for something else.

Zigs are excellent during winter so I decided to try a piece of yellow foam on a 1ft zig on the feeder rod, my thinking being that some of the liquidised bread would float up through the water column and a suspended bait may trigger a bite...

And it worked! After ten minutes the feeder rod roarded off with what felt like a decent fish. Sadly, I never got it to the bank suffering a hook pull at the net... But it was encouraging to get a bite on a new method.

By now time was marching on and with no indication that the pink popup on the helicopter rig was going to produce a bite I decided on a move to the next swim. It's only five metres down the bank but peg 1 gives you access to the bowl end of the lake and I could still fish the lily pads from another angle. It's a move that'd paid off in the past but with the weather steadily worsening I was beginning to wonder if the conditions were completely killing the fishing...

Twenty minutes later the helicopter rod ripped off followed by the zig/feeder rod as I was slipping the first fish back! So the move was definitely worth it and getting a 2nd run on the zig was a conference booster.

But the bites dried up again, so much so that I decided another move was the go and up sticks round to the other side to try peg 7. The weather had changed again with the wind and rain stopping and a bit of blue sky showing. I only came round with the bare essentials and got both rods out, the helicopter in the bowl but quite close in and the feeder on a longer chuck towards the Lilly's lilies. Sadly nothing happened, not a knock or a tap despite giving three different spots twenty minutes each. By now it was 2:30pm and I was beginning to get a bit desperate for a fish!

I gave it 20 minutes back in swim 1 and lost a run on the helicopter. Another move back to swim 25 where I started the day produced nothing so I moved yet again further up the lake settling in swim 2 where some died back rushes and lily pads to my left looked like they might hold fish. This is also the thinner end of the lake so there's less open water to go at but the right hand side moving down the lake was in the sunshine so with a bit of luck there may also be carp heading to the warming water.

The fact that I spooked one fish casting the feeder gave me hope that the carp had found the 3 bread and groundbait balls I'd chucked in to prime the swim 10 minutes before the move....

I didn't have to wait long to get a run, with both rods producing a couple of fish a piece in the space of 15 minutes. The runs kept coming as I packed down, and I foul hooked a fish while reeling in the feeder rod so the fish had definitely pushed further up to the thinner end during the day. So another good day on the bank, harder than the previous trips but it's still very rewarding to be getting bites in winter from a new venue. A lot of moves really took this session from a couple to lots of runs and fish on the bank!

I'm currently praying to the river gods for a decent week of weather so maybe, just maybe I can head out to the river on Friday...

In terms of 'must do mods' on the DRZ400, the list goes:

1. case savers
2. bash plate
3. barkbusters

and purely for aesthetics:

4. tail tidy

Having done the first three items when I picked up the bike a year ago I've been putting off doing the tail tidy as there always seemed to be something else to spend money on. But having put up with everyone I ride with telling me I 'really have to do something about the arse end of the bike...' for a long time I decided to get to it and replace it.

The first challenge was finding a suitable unit. The ones offered by B&B and R&G appear top notch in terms of quality but pretty expensive for what they are. Asking around on Facebook quickly revealed that the Savage tail tidies listed on eBay for around $40 are more that up to the task at a fraction of the price. nice.

So I ordered one up from eBay along with an A4 piece of 4.5mm polycarbonate. One of the fellas who'd chimed in on the Facebook post had suggested making a backing plate for the licence plate as in his words 'it stops the number plate becoming a meat slicer' and also reduces the risk of the number plate cracking (which seems to be a common problem when the bike gets dropped).

While I was waiting for the unit to turn up in the post I got to designing the backing plate template and figuring out all the other bits I'd need to make the project run smoothly. One thing that came up in my research was that the police are pretty hot on roadworthy dual sport motorcycles having a reflector on the back of the bike:

All motorcycles must have at least 1 rear-facing red reflector which is visible from either side of the rear of the motorcycle.

https://www.tmr.qld.gov.au/Safety/Vehicle-standards-and-modifications/Vehicle-standards/Motorcycle-standards#reflector

if they pull you over cos they're in a bad mood, sure as eggs are eggs you'll pick up a fine. Interestingly, when I took the tail tidy into the local police station the cop on the desk said he wouldn't pull me up on it! But then I found out that traffic cops are a different department to bobbies in squad cars and decided that it wasn't worth taking the risk... The good news is that the factory fender ships with great bolt on reflector so my template incorporated the original to keep everything nice and legal.

And to doubly make sure the cops would be happy I also picked up these round screw in reflectors that I'd use in place of bolts - safety first and all that.

The template can be downloaded here: QLD Motorcycle Number Plate Template PDF. Please note: it seems that each state has a slightly different set of dimensions!

Which left the last challenge being how to wire in the back brake. I had no joy finding a 3 wire connector that matched the one on the bike and after a lot of asking around the general consensus was to cut the current wires close to the current brake light and then splice/solder the wire to the ones on the new unit. After some hunting around I found these excellent 'solder splice heatshrink tubes' at JayCar. What a genius idea: the middle of the heatshrink tube has a small band of solder so all you do is slide the tubing onto one of the wires, merge the wire strands as you normally would when joining wires with solder, slide the tubing back over both wires aligning the solder section with the middle of the joined wires and heat with a butane or electric coil lighter (or a heat gun if you have one, long and short being 'heat' not 'flame' as you don't want to burn anything). The heat melts the solder giving a great join quality and meanwhile the shrinktube contracts around the wire giving a waterproof seal. Wrap in electrical tape and it's good to go.

Once the unit arrived the first thing I discovered is that the slots don't line up with the holes on an Australian number plate - which isn't a big deal but if i was going to fix the plate to my polycarbonate backing plate I was going to have to perform some surgery. After a few experiments I decided to cut the ends off either side of the tail tidy and drill new holes in the plate to mount it.

I checked with the legality of this and found that:

Drilling holes in a number plate is only permitted:

• to enable it to be attached to a vehicle
• if the holes do not interfere with the appearance of any characters on the plate
• if plates are not altered in any way so as to damage or deface the plate.

https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/registration/numberplate/replace-change

The next challenge was figuring out which wires joined to which. The wire colours on the new unit don't match so it was a case of trial and error to figure it out: twist the wires together, turn the bike on, pull the brake lever and check to see if the light gets brighter - it turned out the combination was:

• grey to red
• black to black
• white to green

With the wires joined, the number plate and reflector fixed onto the backing plate and the indicators added it was a simple case of removing the old unit and bolting the new one in place using the original screws. The cables were routed around the subframe, the fender went back on and it was job done.

All in, it was probably $65 including bolts etc from Bunnings - we'll worth it as I think you'll agree, it looks far better than the original! 

Only a short ride, 3 hours in the forest up at Mnt Mee with Wayne, Ronnie, Chris and Guy but that was perfect for me as to be honest, I kinda felt like I was starting over... They reckon it takes a couple of weeks to 'forget' how to ride and a couple of hours to get back into the rhythm.

So I went for it! It was a little shaky at first and as it was very dry and dusty I took it slow and steady and had a great time.

Highlights of the day we're spotting a huge snake (well, huge to me - apparently it was a baby!) and making it up 'A Break' in one go without hitting the deck.

All in all a perfect blip in the forest - it's good to be back ;)

As ever, I had the excellent Relive app running on the phone which captured the entire route - if you've not tried it, it's GPS tracking app that compiles any media you shot along the way into a video. Well worth a go!

Today was no exception! Apart from smashing through some great puddles and getting more confident on sand the highlight of the day was 'The Clergyman's Track'. I've no idea how Matt found his way back here, I'm guessing he had it plugged into the GPS but after winding through the forest we found ourselves at a fairly innocent looking right turn into the bush...

Which is where the fun and games began. This tiny winding track was excellent: at some points it was just wide enough to get the bike through, then you were winding through trees, then puddles, then getting around fallen trees... All slow work but so much fun.

And the reason for the track name? Well Matt and Luke bumped into a couple of riders some weeks back who showed them the track and they turned out to be ministers!

The other thing I've stated to use is the excellent Relive app on my phone. Set the app recording at the beginning of the ride and it'll follow your every move. Take some snaps along the way or shoot some video and when you're done, click finish and it'll build you a video along with the media you shot along the way and the stats of your ride (speed, elevation etc).

Pretty impressive stuff! It even allows you to export the data to a KLM file so you can load it into a GPS device or Google Maps and you can also explore the root on Google Earth via the website. Well worth checking out.

It was a bit of a slow start - there were 6 riders today which can sometimes take a bit of getting going but we headed off around 9ish. The moment we transferred from the road to dirt I remembered I'd not aired down my tires so after a quick hop off bike to let some air out we disappeared into the forest.

Which is where things started getting interesting... Wyane's bike (anther DRZ400) started playing up, cutting out and being a pain to start. Then Ian disappeared down a hole and hit the dirt and Wayne, who was following behind, grabbed a handful of brake and also ended up eating the dirt, smashing his phone, left barkbuster and rear left indicator in the process...

So we set off again but it quickly became apparent that things really weren't going well: Wayne's bike eventually died and refused to start and it appeared that something wasn't good with Ian's wrist as it had started to swell and was pretty painful.

Eventually Matt towed Wayne back to the bitchumen and we had a bit of a conflab about what to do. In the end the broken DR was left at a random house we found. Ian rode out on the back of Steph's bike and Wayne drove Ian's Yamaha YZ450 back to the car park with the plan being to hire a trailer and come back to pick up the bike!

It was only 11am and we were down to 3 riders - Luke, Matt and myself. To be honest, I was all for writing it off and heading home but luckily Matt and Luke's resolve was better than mine and off we went again...

...and I'm so glad we did! The next 3 or so hours were fantastic fun, the highlight being Luke's shortcut: an completely overgrown track with fallen logs and other obstacles to get over, loads of fun.

The other thing I'd brought along on the ride was my GoPro. It's been sat in the camera bag since returning to Australia so I figured it was time to dust it off and give it a go. Although I shot about 20gb of footage only 5 minutes or so were usable! There's clearly a learning curve to shooting interesting footage on a dirt bike... I leant some lessons though, namely to wear the camera higher on my chest, point it up and only turn it on when something interesting is happening!