I had been wanting to do an overnight solo trip for a while after doing the day drive through the Nevis Road. A few people in the 4WD & Overlanding in NZ group on Facebook suggested Loch Katrine near Lake Sumner. After looking at the DOC website it looked stunning and a great place to try my first overnight trip. It offers fishing and mountain biking so I had to pack both into the Suzuki.
Had a couple of false starts to get up there. With sickness and poor weather in the region stopping me from going on a couple of the planned weekends. But the forecast for Saturday and Sunday of Show weekend in Canterbury looked perfect.
I borrowed a stretcher and a small gas bottle for my cooker from a workmate. Got some supplies from Complete Outdoors, a pack of Back Country meals and some pans to boil some water. Add to this the recent suspension lift to the Suzuki Escudo and I was ready to hit the road.
The drive-in on Lake Sumner Road
It was quite a nice drive, the road is pretty rough at points. I found that the road tyre pressures were a bit uncomfortable so found a spot to air down them to about 25 from the 38 psi that they started at. This made the drive better. The place I stopped at was near an old bridge and a group of white water rafting were getting ready to head off. I ended up having a chat with the tour bus driver and gave some more insight into the place.
As I drove in and saw Lake Taylor it looked awesome and I could not wait to get around to Loch Katrine.
Driving around to Loch Katrine and here the road got quite a bit rougher. Any 4WD should be able to do it comfortably but a 2WD car would struggle. Here are some photos of the drive around and later on is a video of my drive out of Loch Katrine
Arriving at Loch Katrine
Once I made it to Loch Katrine I quickly got my table, cooker, and gas bottle out to make some lunch. While having lunch I read my book for a bit and enjoyed the amazing view.
After lunch, I had a quick fish just out in front on the shoreline. I walked around the corner a bit with a black and gold toby on. In my first cast I had a hit, my second I had a little fish on which I released at my feet. Then a couple more small hits and nothing else. The North West wind started to pick up so I went and read my book in the Escudo while this died down.
Night time
Once the wind had died down, I started to set up my tent and stretcher. I quickly found that the stretcher I had borrowed was too big to fit in the tent. But squeezed it in past the fly netting. The main problem was it sat very high for my small tent.
I made my dinner of Roast Chicken with mashed potato which for a dehydrated meal was actually very tasty.
After dinner, I tried again for another fish with a few others, without any luck even with the rising and jumping all around us. Here is a short video I tried to get of all the fish. They did like to stop once I hit record. I really need to learn how to fly fish.
