The UniSA boardriders organised a surf trip to Yorke Peninsula in the last weekend of May. Great I thought. But the car drive is 4-5 hours. Too long. Let’s take the Cessna instead. But where is the airport?

A 45 minute plane ride in a trusty old Cessna 172 is much preferable to a 5 hour bus ride. The only problem was: There is no airport or landing strip near Inneston national park. After calling around for a while I was able to track down a farmer that would let me land in his paddock.

This was going to be exciting. The boardriders president, Chris, as well as Maxime and myself, decided to fly over. But where exactly was this paddock, and was it good enough to land on? The farmer told me planes had landed there before, but that I would land completely at my own risk. No worries.

After finding the general area we circled for a little while to decide which paddock was the right one. They all look sort of the same from the air. In the end, after a few low-passes I decided on which paddock to land in. And low and behold, we managed to land.

We then walked down to the pub at Marion Bay and had a few beers while we were waiting for the others to drive over. Maxime, our resident French guy, found some French liquor called Richard, that he hadn’t had in ages. Obviously, he’d forgotten how drunk he gets off it. But the time we were finally picked up in the pub he’d finished half the bottle, and educated the entire pub about how to drink it. The only guy that really took an interest was the owner of the pub.

Anyway, it was a great weekend of surfing and partying. I am still shit at surfing, but it was a beautiful day (it’s winter here now), and I enjoyed just paddling around in the water.

When time came to leave on the Sunday we actually had to scare a large flock of sheep out of the paddock, so that we could take off. I don’t know what is more exciting? Landing at a big international airport, or in farmer Schmidt’s paddock?