We packed up early enough from the Pentecost river free camp and had to reverse out of our spot due to the nature of free camps and people park anywhere around you.
Once out we set up our go pro camera and put our drone in the air to film us crossing the infamous Pentecost River.
The crossing was of course uneventful but still quite the photo opportunity.
We took our time driving the extremely rough road about 120 klms to Ellenbrae Station where are camp is for the next few days.
This station is famous for the scones, no doubt over priced but we will give them a go at some point.
We booked in for two nights and chose the camp ground closest to the swimming hole, a swimming hole we probably wont use but still we had a good spot.
Then disaster struck!!
Doing my regular checks of the car and van I noticed a slight crack forming in one of the suspension arms. My initial thoughts were holiday over and the feeling that we had broken something that major that we couldn't continue was not a great feeling at all.
But true to my style I straight away went through the possible solutions.
1, Get the suspension manufacturer to post a new arm to somewhere near us. This turned out to be not ideal, mainly because there customer service is pathetic and secondly we don't really want to be stuck here for several weeks waiting for them.
2, Get towed out of this very remote location and have someone else fix the problem as we are very well insured for remote recovery. But this also may take weeks or even longer as we are no where near people who would have the parts or resources to do a repair like this.
3, Fix it myself. Deep down I knew this was our only chance of continuing our holiday.
So first thing I did was to ask the cattle station we are staying at if I could use thier welder or if not would they kindly weld the part as it really was a minor repair. It would almost certainly escalate if we left it and end in total disaster as the suspension arm would break totally off on these rough roads.
And to my surprise they were not willing to help in any way at all. They get this all the time so now they have a policy of not fixing anything and not lending anything. I guess humans have messed this up over the years. They said we would have to go all the way back out to Kununurra to get it fixed which is about a 500 klm round trip back on the very rough road we just did.
This is something I would have done if needed as we really didn't have any other choice.
However I rang the next station down the road and they were totally opposite to this station. They were only to happy to help me and let me use whatever I needed to fix the problem. It is worth noting one cattle station is privately family owned and one is owned by tourist operators........the family owned station were the nice people.
They were around a 320klm round trip but seemed like the better option as it also gave us an idication what the road is going to be like pushing on.
So rather than let this little mishap dampen our spirits we went for a walk to the water hole for a look and yep it was a murky water swimming spot that has fresh water crocodiles but non the less it was crowded with people swimming!
That afternoon I went to work to pull this suspension arm out. I can tell you, doing this on the ground in the dirt is not a pleasant job. I had no jack stands and only our tiny little jack we use to change wheels.
But I got it done. I didn't put a call out on a gibb river road facbook page for anyone in this area that has a jack stand and jack and in typical Aussie style a bloke near us had all that! Neither of them were large enough to help me but I gave him a couple of beers for letting me try them. I do appreciate good people.
Anyway with the suspension out I was able to see what had happened. In the manufacturing process one of the welds was not great right a critical spot. Easy to see now it was cracked but it of course looked fine before it was cracked. And also we made the right decision to take it out and fix it because it was also starting to crack in another spot due to this initial weld not holding.
This particularly annoys me because in my last camper I built I made the suspension arms myself and they took an absolute pounding on the outback trips that camper did in its life with no issues. Yet on this build I was more than happy to use 'quality' suspension arms built commercially. They came with a heap of gear we purchased to make the van, also I didn't have time to make my own anyway.
But here we are, suspension arm loaded in the ute ready for us to drive down to the next station early the next morning to fix it.
Off to bed we went and a sleepless night for me.