Seabird to Guilderton

Club Visitors Day 2014

Trip Leader: Michael Gilbert

This year was the third consecutive Visitors Day I had organised.

Although the first two years had been very successful, they had also been a very long day. For this reason I decide to shorten the event to run from Seabird down the coastal track to Guilderton for lunch, missing out Wilbinga completely, plus limiting the quantity of visitor cars from 25 to 20, cutting the overall convoy to 27 cars. The result of these two changes made the whole event much easier to handle for both myself and the team leaders.

The trip started by meeting with all the team leaders before all the visitors started to arrive at the 10th Light Horse car park at 8.00am.

This was our first challenge. It turned out at least three other 4WD clubs were also meeting their visitors gathered from the 4WD show that morning. This was going to be fun!

However being there early allowed us to obtain the prime spot in the car park so at least we were ready for our visitors.

This year the team leaders were Troy, Richard, Peter, Murray and two tail end Charlie’s, Craig and Trevor with Elaine.

There was just about enough time to do the trip briefing before our visitors started to arrive.

Cars started to appear from all directions as each of the clubs’ visitors pulled into the car park. We had Elaine with her clipboard meet each of our visitors as they arrived, to then direct them to their team leader. This system worked well allowing all 20 visitors to be moved quickly into the car park behind their correct team leader.

I like to get everyone off by 9.00am, and all visitors and team leaders were gathered at 8.45am at the front of the convoy for a welcome and short trip briefing, ending with the words “above all have fun”! We headed off on time, bound for Seabird.

On arrival at Seabird we gathered the whole convoy on a small grassed area alongside the public toilets, where everyone lowered their tyre pressures down to 12psi. This is always met with surprise from many of our visitors who have never let so much air out of their tyres before!

The track down to Guilderton is a nice easy drive with beautiful scenery of natural bush overlooking the blue waters of the Indian Ocean. As the convoy approached Guilderton the track starts to change, giving way to some nice dunes for visitors to have fun with.

This always slows the convoy down as some of our visitors have a bit of a challenge getting up the first dune. As we were not going to Wilbinga this year I diverted the convoy up towards the Guilderton light house, which is on top of a large dune and usually quite rutted…. just to give everyone a little more of a challenge. To my surprise most of our visitors managed to navigate this section of the track without too much problem. Only the “whoo hoo” over the radio as some got to the top, showed they were having fun.

Directly after the light house, the team leaders assisted each of their teams to air up their tyres to road pressure, and head down to the lunch area by the river on the southern side of Guilderton. This year everything had gone to plan and with the smaller group had been much easier to handle.

At the lunch area everyone gathered together at a very nice spot in a u-shape close to the river, this gave everyone plenty of time to eat and to get to know the other visitors and team leaders.

To officially close the trip, all the team leaders gathered in front of the visitors to formally tell them about the benefits of our club, and to thank them for coming.

I must say I personally enjoyed the day, with the day finishing after lunch it took much of the pressure off.

Last but not least.. a personal Thank You from me to all the Team Leaders and Tail End Charlie’s who made it all possible.

Thanks guys.

Michael Gilbert