Setev kayaking
Day 4 Report

Day 4 - 15/4/08 - Hayes Crossing to Somerset

Fancy getting lost on Lake Wivenhoe. The first 10km is a lake but then it becomes the old river because the water level is so low. After a costly error I figured this out and found the river by looking at land forms.

An interesting point about the lake section is that Wivenhoe power station is there. Don’ ever let anyone tell you that you cannot store electricity. There are better ways, such as heat in graphite but water works just fine. Wivenhoe power station may be old technology but it pumps water up hill when there is extra power and lets it run back down when more power is needed. This is called pumped storage power. The giant Tarong power station is 1400MW. Wivenhoe power station is 500MW.

On Wivehoe you can see thousand of hectares of revegetation where the water level had dropped. As the level has increased, some of this has been covered and is now generating the greenhouse gas, methane. When the dam fills there will be many thousands of tonnes of methane generated. Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The end of the day was pretty tough with a hard slog of about 8km through mud up to my knees and over boulders half a metre diameter. The crew at Somerset were a welcome site. The last two hours were in the dark so they guided me to the camp site with torches.

We are 176km from the start at Brisbane and today was a 59km effort.

This one smelt a bit
Lake Wivehoe Power Station
A hard day
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Lake Wivehoe beauty
Aquatic weeds
Lost on Lake Wivehoe
Still going at 7pm




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