Placid paddle
Crocs or not, it’s a placid trip
Lake Placid, in the lower part of the World Heritage listed Barron Gorge National Park at Caravonica, is an adventurer’s playground, particularly for those with a love of whitewater. This is, of course, despite the recreational reserve’s name and its association with a film about a murderous crocodile.
IT’S a beautiful, calm morning at Lake Placid and my friend and I have just paddled past a crocodile trap.
There’s no mistaking the signs on the large contraption, that warn you to stay away.
We are, of course, familiar with the infamous horror movie that shares the name of this aquatic reserve, about a gigantic crocodile that goes on a murderous rampage.
But everything is just so, well, placid, at this recreational reserve that we just shrug our shoulders and keep paddling.
Lake Placid, located in the lower part of the World Heritage listed Barron Gorge National Park at Caravonica, is an adventurer’s playground, particularly for those with a love of whitewater.
But we’re not here to traverse the rapids – we’re mainly here to see just how far upstream we can go on our humble stand-up paddleboard and cheap-as-chips kayak.
Once we follow the bend in the river for about a kilometre, it’s clear we can’t go that far at all. The water flow is quite low – there hasn’t been a release from the Barron Gorge Hydro Station for a while – and our path is blocked by large boulders that make up the rapids.
It’s quite challenging trying to navigate our watercraft through the boulders, so we eventually turn around and make our way back downstream, observing Ulysses butterflies and native birds fluttering back and forth from the riparian vegetation.
By the time we make it back to the carpark, neither of us have spotted anything resembling a predatory reptilian.
We’re here at the wrong time of day and the wrong day of the week to tuck into woodfired pizza at Alessandro’s, overlooking the lake.
But we make plans instead to head to the nearby Red Beret Hotel at Redlynch, to top off our “intensive” paddling session with a counter lunch.
While we start strapping our board and kayak to the car’s roof racks, a ranger parks next to us and proceeds to unload his own kayak.
He’s apparently there to check the croc trap, to see whether they have snagged the 2.5m long reptile that was spotted a few weeks ago by fellow kayakers.
He doesn’t seem concerned about the animal, but says it needs to be removed for the sake of public safety.
In these tranquil surrounds, the threat of anything dangerous seems incomprehensible, but we suppose it’s better to be safe than sorry.