Animals I have met

The other day I was telling someone my Emu story and it occurred to me that I seem to have reasonably frequent run-ins with critters while out and about on the bike.  Getting into Adv riding has only increased my odds.  So far I've been lucky in that the run-ins have only been eye openers for me, although some critters were harmed  (unintentionally) in the making of this post...

So, now for a bit of a list and maybe some tales...

Birds

They say that in NZ we have a bird for every job that mammals do in other places (our only native mammals are a couple of little bats) so you tend to see a few.  I won't mention every bird I've seen but just the ones where things have got interesting:

• Swifts - normally travel in squadrons of hundreds and explode on impact when hit by an RG250 at 80mph...
• Sparrows - small and fast.  Will cook right through when wedged between the oil cooler and fairing on a GSX750F.  Cooked sparrow comes apart easy...
• Pukeko - dumb enough to run into the side of a Tenere.
• Hawks - big, slow, angry and not to be messed with.  Often snacking in the middle of the road.  Nearly took one on the handlebars of my GSX400X - would have been exciting.
• Weka - don't normally see them on the road but they are nosey so and so's

Amorous weka meets SB...

• Ducks - hard case jokers.  Slow to cross the road unless they lift off.  Unfortunately hit some little ones with the VTR one night.  Mark hit an adult duck one day and it was like watching a cartoon...
• Magpies, seagulls, pheasants - morons that get in the way occasionally.
• Penguins/kiwi - only seen warning signs so far.  Seen wild kiwi on Stewart Island - cool!
• Turkeys - are turkeys...

Why did the turkey cross the road?

• Emus...

Small furries

• Cats - quick but dumb.
• Hedgehogs - slippery, often flat.
• Dogs - not too bright but man's best friend.  Did see a smart lab the other night - he used the pedestrian crossing to get across a busy road (yes, he was taking himself for a walk too).
• Rabbits - fast, but not as fast as a Connie.  Soft.
• Possums - harder than rabbits.  Slow, can be dazzled by lights, make a thumping sort of noise when hit by a Connie mid corner.
• Rats, Weasels, stoats, ferrets - introduced pests (like all the others above) that munch on our birds.  Small, fast and hard to hit, but I try...

Bigger stuff

• Goats - quick, agile.  Often all over the road but pretty good at getting out of the way.
• Sheep - dopey, generally have no idea.  The smartest ones appear to live on the French Pass road - no fences but they know to get off the road for vehicles.

Not the French Pass Road (much further South)

• Pigs.  Domestic ones are fat and slow but normally stay off the road (they like wet, muddy drains though).  Wild ones are small, fast, hard and hard to see at night - would not want to hit one.
• Seals - only on the rocks at the side of the road.  Only seen fur seals but would like to see an elephant - as long as it wasn't on the road...
• Deer - fast, scatter brained.  Scare Concours riders when they run out in front of them at 2am in the night.  Not so bad in daylight - and this is the French Pass Road.

• Horses - big, solid, dumb and sometimes on the loose on the East Cape.

• Cattle - see horses but with added poo and more moo.  Have tangled with calves, cows, steers and bulls in my travels...

So far not many moas or Fiordland moose...

He froze upon seeing the Connie pull up...

And I'd be unlucky to come across a sign like this (popped up in my Facebook feed by coincidence).  I will keep my eyes peeled though...perhaps best to stay away from any Jenny Craig's...

Silly Season

So apparently the silly season is upon us and everyone is supposedly under pressure, tired out and in need of a break.  Meanwhile our road toll has already exceeded last year's tally and the remedy is speeding fines for 5km/h over the limit - the same solution as every holiday period for the last few years (thanks Australia). 

Anyway, there must have been something weird happening in Palmy yesterday as I witnessed 1 near miss, got myself wrapped up in another and came across two separate accidents...Our populations is supposedly around 84,000 (when the scarfies are in town I 'spose).  Not a bad effort for one day's work, but these are only the ones I saw...

Near miss number 1.  4WD fails to give way to a motorcycle (not me) on the big roundabout just up the road to me.  I got a good view of this and the poor rider must have messed his jacks when a dirty great SUV appeared next to him.  But then, the 4WD must have been in a hurry to just nip around to the left and go blasting up a short dead-end street.  Dramatic re-creation below...

Next up, it was my turn to enter the chaos of the roundabout.  Mine was nowhere near as serious as I was never going to ride the poor old Tenere into the side of a truck that decided to not give way to me.  I did however come to a complete stop in the middle of the roundabout.

Two near misses in less than a minute so now it was time to see what happens when a near miss turns into an event - and this one looked pretty nasty, I hope nobody was injured.

I was held up majorly (along with hundreds of others) by an accident on Fitz Ave which is a major road coming into town.  At an (intersection controlled by lights), two cars had come together with quite a whack - the front wheel, axle and suspension had been torn from one of the cars and neither will probably ever turn a wheel again.  This is a 50km/h zone.

At work, a number of my team were held up by the accident and it was a good topic for our safety moment.  I was able to add in my other earlier adventures...Lots of head shaking all around...

Just after 5pm I was in my car (swapped vehicles, dog in the back) and making my way to the old's when I got held up by the next accident.  This time around a bus had taken on a car.  To me it looked like the bus had decided to turn out into the traffic (busy road, 2 lanes each way) and managed to tag some poor unfortunate.  People everywhere, chaos etc etc.

Well, I'm not an expert but I don't see speed as being a factor in any of these near misses/accidents.  Maybe one of the cars in accident #1 was getting along but far more likely was that someone was running an orange/red. 

What I reckon was the cause of all of them was silliness and I don't think you can use the time of year as an excuse.  In each case someone decided to ignore road rules or to make a risky decision.

ACC have taken a lot of stick about the ridiculous cost of bike registrations (plenty from me for sure - it costs me over a grand a year for 2 bikes) but they have been putting some money into subsidised rider training and then there's Geoff and his mates also offering good training to bike riders.  Advanced driver training courses are available but they are never even mentioned when the police are talking about road safety and I don't think there's any such thing as subsidised driver training...

But, unfortunately driver/rider training is probably only taken up by sensible people - the idiots out there are far too good to need it.  If only the cops could get silliness detectors for their cars...

Anyway, not the most eloquent rant and I certainly don't have all the ideas to fix stupid but please be careful out there, no silly behaviour, watch out the other loonies, have fun and take care over this silly season!

Might be safer sticking to the gravel...

Just in case

The other day I was reading a post by Biggo and in his write-up of a local ride he described how one of the riders suffered a puncture and that they fixed it on the road and managed to get home safely.  They had to borrow a compressor and in a comment I mentioned that I carry a compressor with me now.  Biggo in return asked me what sort of compressor it was and now that Geoff has posted about his puncture preparedness I thought that I better add my two cents.

First up, it appears that I carry the same kit as Geoff previously has and I can vouch for it's effectiveness.

Disgustingly blurry pic of my Genuine Innovations kit

Kit contents - one rope missing...

On a long weekend away a few years ago my tyres were subjected to a bit of abuse in very hot temperatures (high 30's) and wore a lot quicker than I had expected.  Before leaving I was sure that they would last the distance - unfortunately I was wrong.  Riding out a gravel driveway in Hicks Bay, a small stone managed to puncture my rear tyre.

Quick as a flash, with some guidance from others (we'd already fixed one puncture the night before) we found the leak and had it plugged.  Some kind locals then loaned us an ageing compressor which soon had me back up to pressure for the 500km ride home.

In Geoff's post he questions the effectiveness of the stick ropes to maintain pressure but if you insert them properly then I believe they are amazingly good.  Firstly you thread the rope throw the awl and poke it through the hole and a reasonable way in.  Then you give the awl a twist and remove it before cutting off any excess rope and re-inflating the tyre.  Both bikes that suffered punctures on this trip were loaded up (one had a pillion as well) and made it home with no issues in very hot conditions.  My tyre lost no pressure but obviously came off the bike at the first opportunity.

The plug after 500 hard kilometres

Now to the one thing that I don't like about the kits (although it is a small criticism), the CO2 canisters.  These will never inflate you to the required pressure but on the plus side, might give you enough pressure to ride to a compressor.  I've solved this by now carrying a compressor.

Initially I was going to do what Geoff has done - buy a cheap compressor and break it down to the smallest possible size I could be removing any case or excess bits and bobs.  But when I visited Supercheap the compressor I ended up with was on sale and offered a few other handy features.

The handy features start with a built-in pressure gauge and the ability to dial up what pressure you require and the compressor does the rest - too easy.  The other neat feature is the built-in light - this might come in handy if I'm every unlucky enough to get a puncture in the middle of the night...

I've left the 12v plug on the compressor as both my bikes have sockets and they're far easier to use than fumbling around for the battery (the Connie's battery is well tucked away).  And so far I've been lucky enough to not require the compressor to fix a puncture but it has been used a number of times to top up various bikes' tyres.

The compressor is probably quite a bit bigger than Geoff's one but as I'm now getting a bit more off the beaten track with the DL I'm starting to build-up a bit of an emergency tool kit so now have a tool bag that can easily be swapped between top boxes.  The compressor, repair kit and a number of tools fit easily in it.

Prepared?

So, I hoped I'm prepared for the unplanned mishap but really would prefer to lug this all over the countryside and never need to use it!

Interesting musings

Check out this great post by Dan on Musings of an Intrepid Commuter.

Good food for thought for idiots that compete in long distance riding events...

Keeping ya wits about ya

I took the Honda out for a little ride this afternoon and on my return trip through town witnessed an accident directly in front of me. In fact, but for sheer luck (2 seconds in it) I could have been tangled up in it.

A stupid car driver pulled out of a parking area directly across one lane of traffic and into the car in front of me in the second lane. I managed to stop in plenty of time but it could easily have been me or if I hadn't been paying a bit of attention I could have ridden into it.

The truth of it is that I was only paying attention to what was going on directly in front of me and maybe what was in my mirrors. I wasn't checking out the parking area that carefully - and it was full of other cars and people wandering around. There were a lot of hazards that I wasn't even bothering about and the accident came as a surprise.

Usually I'm pretty good at checking out each side road I pass whether on my left or right and here I was ignoring another source of danger - stupid. The good news as that both car

drivers are ok (although their corollas are a bit 2nd had) and I got a cheap wake-up call.

So keep ya wits about ya eh?

ABS

So I've got this big fat tourer fitted with radial brakes and ABS but is ABS all it's cracked up to be?

A lot of people have said things like "a good rider doesn't need ABS - their reactions are better and they can brake harder without ABS." Well I always doubted this and still believe that ABS is worth whatever premium the manufacturer charges for the option. But I've now had the ABS come on three times while riding the Concours and have good and bad experiences.

Firstly the bad. Twice now I have come up to a corner and had the ABS come on when it shouldn't have and so increased my stopping/slowing distance. On both occasions this was on road surfaces that were very bumpy: the first time the road had lots of little bumps and the second time was on the Napier-Taupo road on a corner where there are actual judder bars in the braking zone (who's dumb idea was that?).

What I believe happens is that the bumps may be enough to take a bit of weight off the front wheel and so allow the brake to slow it to a speed which is less than that of the rear wheel. The ABS computer thinks "heck the wheels locked, off with the anchors." Hence the increase in braking distance. Repeated bumps only make matters worse with repeated activation/deactivation of the brakes. On the "judder bars" my braking only really happened once I was clear of the bumps and darn nearly into the corner. Not exactly "safe."

But now for the good. On the Grand Challenge I had to hit the picks pretty hard on a wet road. The ABS kicked in but was very smooth in it's operation and braking performance was more than enough to slow me up for the corner. Excellent - I think that I may have been in trouble if the bike had the same monster brakes but no ABS to back them up.

So, on the whole I think that ABS is definitely worth having especially on a heavy bike with awesome brakes - I don't think I'd like a bike with such powerful brakes and no ABS, it could be a recipe for disaster in the wet or if the rider is not paying attention. I think that they only way to get around the problem on bumpy roads is to aware of the problem and to be observant of the road conditions (as you should be anyway). On bumpy roads brake earlier and smoothly and be ready just in case the ABS kicks in.

This is all just my opinion but I hope it at least informs you to some extent on the merits of ABS.