Kinda didn't think I was gonna post this out of respect to my friends and their dignity, but it's worth posting and well... let's just change their names to protect them.
So the weekend before last we went up to the shack and there were a fair bunch of us there. After a reasonably big night on Friday everyone was slow getting up Saturday morning, and we didn't really head out to do stuff till about midday. Rimi and his crew went walking in the Freycinet park, while Tim, Sarah and I went 4WDing up to
Hardings Falls and our trepid travellers (lets call them Victoria and Mandy) went off in search of the
Apsley Gorge nestled in the heart of the Douglas Apsley national park.
We had a great day checking out the cascading falls in this little gorge, and some bumpy bits on the 4WD in. And by the time Rimi and his crew got home it seemed that they had had a great day too.
About 5:15pm I asked Tim when we should begin to worry about the girls (Victoria and Mandy) and start calling them. We decided to wait a little longer. About 5:40 Tim made his fist attempt to call, but went straight to message bank, and then about 5:50 he got the first call/message back from them. "HELP - we're stuck on the Apsley River, come get us!!"
True to form, Tim launched straight into rescue mode and come grabbed me out of the shack. We went back out and called Victoria and Mandy to make sure they were OK and get some more of the story from them. "We were walking down the Apsley River, rocks are wet due to the rain, it's getting dark - we can't get out - HELP!!" We grabbed some towels, torches and jackets and finally headed out the gate about 6pm.
We tried to call Parks and Wildlife, but ended up getting head office and no one is there at 6pm on a Saturday night, so we called the police - who took our details and said they'd get the local copper to call us. We first went to make sure that Victoria and Mandy hadn't start their walk at the bottom of the park, and then met the local copper (Brett) at the car park.
We made several calls back and forth to make sure we knew exactly the path the girls had taken, so we could have a 'best guess' at where they'd be on the river, and to make sure they didn't move from their current location for risk of getting more lost/injured. Leaving Tim at the car (read: Command Centre, due to car kit = better reception to keep contact with the girls), Brett and I went down to the river to see if we could easily get upstream = NO. So we waited for Stuart from Parks to arrive. By this time it was almost 8pm and the girls were certainly sick of being stuck up a river without any source of light/heat apart from the dim LCD glow from their mobile phones.
With Command Centre Tim in control, Stuart, Brett and I hiked up through the scrub and slippery rocks to find the girls. Thank christ we took extra torches etc. as Brett took several slips on the rocks and on the last big one ended up on his ass in the river with a smashed Maglite. With calls bouncing between the girls, Tim and us, it took us about an hour of struggling up stream to reach them. We arrived at their make shift camp (read: huddled on a rock around a mobile, wet, cold and getting colder by the minute) about 8:50pm.
After some well needed hugs and a stern (read: joking) 'telling off' by Brett, we headed back down the river. To avoid the increasingly slippery rocks Stuart led us inland as we cut corners off the ever bending river. Mandy got a bit worried at one point when she heard Stuart mutter "I may have cut that corner a bit too much".
All in all, it took us till about 10:10pm to get back to the carpark where my parents had arrived and were keeping Tim company while they listened to the footy and waited.
After many thankyou's and apologies we headed back off to the shack to have a shower and get warm/dry. We got back about 11pm and were greeted with some beautifully prepared BBQ sausages and that lonely beer that had been abandoned some 5 hours earlier.
Thanks Mich.. I mean Mandy and Vane.... I mean Victoria - it was an interesting experience that I am sure none of us will ever forget.
Moral of the story :If you are going walking somewhere you haven't been before, make sure you take some form of light source and some extra food.... JUST IN CASE!!!
