MORE DAMED GRAMPIANS Well it's the Easter long weekend and I'm thinking that if Fasslinux hasn't got the Auddies.space gopher server up again by the end of this break, I might finally set up elsewhere. I did eventually get a reply to my email asking whether he was still working on it, and apparantly he is, but it does look a lot like he's making it all too complicated for himself, and he's given up setting deadlines. Of course I'm assuming that like me he's got nothing better to do on public holidays than to work on hobby projects. Actually I decided to swap my holidays over to the preceeding weekend, seeing as the date doesn't matter much to me anyway, either in its religious, or its chocolate rabbit, forms. As such I had the opportinity to go on another one of my dam/reserviour expeditions while, unlike last time, the holiday traffic wasn't tormenting me. This time I decided to try and finish my previous half-completed tour of the reserviors in and around the Grampians national park. My original plan was definately over-ambitious because this trip was a full day's driving in itself, although I did plot one of my typical obscure routes through various back-roads which didn't always go quite where I expected. Actually the drive was great fun. I haven't driven much around the area south of the Grampians and there's really quite a variety of terrain, littered with old farm homesteads in various states of repair. It rained a little on the way there, but conveniently cleared up by the time I got to the first reservoir in the afternoon. This was the big one, the Rocklands Reservoir, with a capacity many times that of any other I'd seen, and even with a page on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocklands_Reservoir gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Rocklands%20Reservoir In fact due to how it twists and turns through a valley, you can't really see very much of the reservoir at once so it's not quite as impressive to look at as it is on paper. So I'm glad I went to the location of the dam itself, because this indeed quite a dominating structure, built entirely of concrete. It isn't all that high, but very long, and there's plenty of infrastructure at the outlet to look at as well, much of it fairly recent as part of an effort to filter out carp eggs from flowing into the river following it. There were a few people about, and at the adjacent caravan park which today makes up the main volume of the Rocklands township (apparanly built to serve the construction of the reservoir). Clearly too cold for any swimming or boating that day, but it seems well equipped for that with a beach area surfaced with something between sand and crushed rock. It looked fairly full to me, but the GWM Water website says it's only at 56% (up from just 24% last year). Maybe the valleys that it fills widen out a lot near the top, or maybe the website's just wrong. Come to think of it, it must be very difficult to calculate the capacity of a reservoir that's in such a weird shape, or I suppose any reservoir using natural terrain. All these dam projects must have kept surveyors very busy back in the 50s and 60s. North of Rocklands, the old ramshackle town centre of Toolondo overlooks one corner of the Toolondo Lake/Reservoir, which is quite distinctly full of the ghostly white remains of many huge gumtrees. Apparantly water is transferred to it from the Rocklands reservoir for extra storage. This storage capacity seems to have only recently come back into use, with the website displaying the current level at 45% compared to just 3% last year, so it was a good time to take a look. It's shallow, much like Lake Lonsdale and Lake Fyans that I saw last time, without any interesting dam structure to be found, but very wide. All the large dead gumtrees, much bigger than those which also stick out of the other 'lakes', give it quite a stark look, especially with a backdrop of smoke from a large burn-off in the bushland area opposite. Certainly a good one for photographs, and recently done up for boating with a new boat ramp at the place where I stopped. I expect that the Rocklands Res. would be more fun to sail around if given the choice though. Unfortunately it was getting a bit late by this point, and after Toolondo I got onto one of those terrible roads that branch off into another one without any noticable indication of completing a turn on the map, so I went about 30Km in the wrong direction up a tediously straight road to Horsham, before threading my way back towards my intended route to Halls Gap via the Wartook Reservoir. The extremely twisty scenic roads through the mountains are a great adventure, but not wise consider after dark, especially with the risk of suicidal kangaroos jumping out of the bushland at any moment. So with the Wartook reservoir in the middle of this stretch, I couldn't waste much time looking around before jumping back into the Jag to make my 20-40Km/hr escape before darkness descended upon the mountain roads. It's actually the oldest of the Grampians reservoirs, being built in the 1880s, and quite pretty, although without much impressive engineering to look at. It's the only reservoir I've visited in the Grampians where swimming is prohibited for some reason, although they do allow boating so that's still more liberal than at the Barwon Water reservoirs. So that completed my tour as originally conceived, although I did still leave out the Moora Moora Reservoir and Taylors Lake, so they stay on the list for future visits to the Grampians. The Jag held up quite well for the longest drive it's been on in quite a while, and passing the 444444Km point on the odometer, which I happened to spot. The only casualty was one brake light bulb. There's a short history of the water system on this page, which describes how it relates to the massive Wimmera Mallee Channel System which the Rocklands Reservoir was built specifically to feed: https://www.gwmwater.org.au/our-water-supply/history-of-our-water-supply/the-historic-wimmera-mallee-channel-system There's also a bit of an information overdose available from these local newspaper articles available for PDF download: https://www.gwmwater.org.au/our-water-supply/history-of-our-water-supply/a-history-of-our-headworks - The Free Thinker.