I'M A DAM FOOL

So it's a long weekend, with Monday off for Labour Day, and 
normally I'd make a point of keeping off the roads to avoid all the 
busy holiday traffic. But, out of touch as I am, I didn't know, so 
I set off anyway to visit one of the dams that I left out of my 
earlier tours due to fear of poor conditions in the wet weather 
last year. Sure enough I was stressed out by an unexpected amount 
of traffic for much of the trip there, which ruined a few 
potentially fun stretches of road. This time my destination was the 
Lower Stony Creek Reservoir, outside of Anakie, a town that sounds 
a lot more radical when pronounced than it does when spelt. In fact 
it was a noticeboard at the Anakie primary school which finally 
clued me in on the next day's public holiday, by which time I at 
least was able to turn off onto a much quieter road and look for 
the small gravel road to the park carpark that appeared a _lot_ 
closer to Anakie on the map than it seemed in real life.

Although there's a road that runs within half a kilometer of the 
dam, I opted to take a 3.5km walk from a carpark that looked on the 
map to be a bit less risky to get to in the Jag. It turned out to 
be a good choice because the route actually followed roughly the 
pipeline running from the dam, which pops up all over the place, 
emerging from tunnels and running over weirs. An information sign 
pointed out that this was all constructed in the 1870s, and it's 
certainly no small feat to have been built without mechanisation 
through the tall twisting valley. There were a few people about, 
but overall I was lucky given the long weekend that the path wasn't 
annoyingly busy.

Although not a wide as any of the other such dams that I've seen, 
it's still quite tall and impressive, with the pointed niches 
housing the outlet valves, and capping stones, giving it a 
particularly antiquated appearance. Also built in the 1870s, it 
turns out to have been only the third concrete dam in the world at 
the time of its construction. The reservioir that it formed was 
pretty near full, and indeed there were indications that it had 
been letting plenty of excess water out into creek running through 
the valley not that long ago.

It's hard to tell exactly how much it's used now. The original 
outlet valve to the steel pipeline, with all its original 
victorian-era rusty cast iron charm, clearly hasn't been turned in 
a long time, although maybe the flow is regulated at the end of the 
pipe instead. Information on the web (which I'm viewing now, I 
don't like to over-research these places before I go to them for 
the first time) vaguely hints that it hasn't been used since a new 
pipeline from the northern reservoirs was completed in 1999, but 
presumably they're still keeping it full as a last resort. Anyway 
it's a particularly nice one, quiet and with easy access to the
shore of  the reservoir itself where I spent a while relaxing /
recovering from the walk. Probably one to visit again when it's
releasing water down the creek, which being dry, combined with
overcast skies, wasn't in ideal condition for photographing.

History of the dam (besides trees, surprisingly little has changed 
since the photo here was taken):
https://www.ipwea.org/blogs/intouch/2018/11/01/retrospective-australias-oldest-concrete-dam

The walk back was easier because there was a cool breeze blowing, 
and it was 5PM by the time I got back to the carpark (as usual I'd 
started late because I took ages plotting an interesting route with 
my maps), so there were no more traffic hassles on the way back. 
Except that I took a different route home and it turned out one of 
the roads was closed, although the signs and bollards were in such 
a disheveled state that it was tempting to not take them seriously. 
So I drove on headed for yet another route that I half-remembered 
from previous travels, and this turned out to be the route to 
another one of these music festivals that are invading central 
victoria. Mercifully it didn't seem to have started yet (although 
I'm not sure why it wouldn't start on a long weekend), but I passed 
a constrant stream of roadside signage aimed at controlling up to 
ten kilometers of expected traffic-jammed festival goers. By the 
time I passed the festival entrance I was almost convinced that I'd 
forgotten the route and was going in the wrong direction anyway, 
but then I finally landed at (almost litterally, it was getting 
quite bumpy on that last stretch) the intersection that I'd been 
looking for and set off for the nearest town to home so that I 
could pick up a pizza. I rarely ever eat out/take-away, but tired 
late returns from road trips are my usual exception.

But, would you believe it, the pizza place doesn't open on Sunday 
anymore! This apparantly being the latest ammendment to their 
opening hours sign which now contains more information sribbled 
over it in permanent marker than in original print. Thu-Sat 5-8PM 
only now apparantly, ho hum. So I ended up cooking for myself after 
all.

Still, good news is that the passenger-side muffler on the Jag 
stayed put. I didn't mention in my last post but I spent Saturday 
making the latest of many attempts at getting it to grip the 
exhaust pipe firmly and not wobble down causing it to knock against 
the car's bodywork (and, one time, fall off completely). I'm almost 
certain that it's been replaced by some previous owner with a 
slightly wrong model, where the pipe was a little wider than it was 
supposed to be. Anyway this time I cut a bunch of slits around the 
end of the pipe and, at the expense of slightly hacksawing my own 
fingers while trying to hold the impossibly shaped thing in 
position (typing this isn't all that comfortable right now), I 
think I got it to take a solid grip. But I also thought that every 
other time I've 'fixed' this problem.

There are a couple of other dams that I never made it to last year, 
besides those in the Grampians that I ran out of time for, so there 
are still a few trips left within day-trip range before I have to 
think about whether I want to start staying overnight at places. Or 
pick another target, like going back to finding fire lookout towers.

Oh and yeah, no word from Fosslinux following that email I sent a 
couple of days ago asking about the future of Aussies.space, and 
the Gopher server is still down, so my not finding another Gopher 
host yet is looking more like laziness than patience now. Still, 
other things to do today, such as trying to fix the cracks in the 
sun room roof from when I ran over it a few weeks ago while bees 
were stinging my ankle during my effort to try and get all the bee 
hives out of my roof. That's another sorry saga that I never did 
find the willpower to write about here.

 - The Free Thinker.