June 05 Dirt course photos

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Adventure Bike Training Weekend

I’d always wanted to do some dirt bike training aimed at our big bikes ever since I’d read about the BMW training course in Germany but I’d never been able to find one, all the courses seemed to be for serious enduro and MX bikes. A story in the BMW club mag about a course they’d organised got me keen on the idea again so the search began again. I called Stay Upright, they said they’d get back to me but I never heard from then again ! I emailed the Stephen gall offroad academy as a last resort, they do enduro / MX courses and didn’t mention anything about the big adventure tourers on their website , to my surprise an email came back saying yes they could do a course for us specifically for the big bikes , excellent !!. Now, was there enough interest to run the course ? , I sent out emails to various groups Im on, my Sydney touring club, the OAR’s , the Oz section on the Advrider website and The Oz Honda V-twinners list, what a response, about 40 people said they were interested, obviously there’s quite a demand for this type of course. The course was to be 2 days over a weekend and the cost $200, a bargain I think, I picked a date and it was on.

The course was held at a small riding park in the hills outside Batemans Bay, I headed off from Sydney about 2pm Friday arvo for the 300km trip south , I managed to avoid the worst of the traffic and made reasonable time, it got dark at Nowra and the cold and the fog rolled in making the last 100km to Batemans Bay interesting. A quick meal at Maccas and it was out into the hills and onto the dirt roads to the campsite. I managed to find it OK though the signs were pretty hard to see and several people ended up having a night dirt odyssey in the hills after missing the sign but they eventually backtracked and found us.

There was basic camping at the park and most people camped out but a few stayed in town. 26 riders attended the course , a good mix including, 2 KTM 950’s, 4 Africa twins , 5 transalps, a selection of 100,1100,1150 and 1200 BMW GS’s , 3 NX650’s 2 KTM 640’s and a lone XTZ660, a couple of bikes were trailered out which as you’’ see later was a good thing. People came from Sydney, Victoria nth NSW and Daniel came all the way from Bourke. Our instructors, Miles Davis and Jason Cater arrived early on Saturday morning. Miles was the main instructor, he has owned a BMW adventure and was an international downhill mountan bike competitor as well as running the Big bike courses. Jason is an ex Aussie enduro champion who normally teaches on the MX / enduro courses and this was his first with the big bikes, both instructors were great and the riding demos they gave us were just amazing and certainly made me feel like I was on L’s again.

The day started with a talk about riding gear and proper body positioning for standing up, we would be standing for most of the course so we also adjusted our foot and hand controls to suit then it was out into the grassy paddocks where we spent most of Saturday. We did lots of exercises aimed at getting used to using the controls standing up and using our body weight to control the bike all at slow speed. Miles told us that “Slow speed skills will improve your riding but riding wont improve your skills� At first I wasn’t convinced but now there’s no question in my mind of how right he was. Full lock figure 8’s , locking the rear wheel and steering with your body weight, locking the front wheel and pushing it across the paddock with a spinning back wheel again steering with your body weight. There were a few minor drops but nothing major, the whole idea being to work on your own personal limits and not feel pressured to do anything to much over your head and we were all at different levels , ost of us were amazed at what we could actually manage to do with our bikes. Just before lunch we were taken on a short trailride and we had our ownly dad crash for the weekend , John went WAY to fast over an erosion hump and launched his 1100 GS into the air ending in a big end over end crash and a basically written off bike , luckily John was one of the people who had trailered down so getting home was no drama.

Saturday arvo was more slow speed excercises followed by a hillclimb uo one of the single tracks on the property, I was absolutely stuffed and was happy when we finished for the day and I’d certainly found some muscles I’d forgotten I had. We had a great night around the fire telling stories and listening to Miles tales of Mountain bike competitions around the world. Bloody hell the world is a small place sometimes, it tuned out that Miles knows the guy I bought my Africa twin off and also know people that Mike went to school with !!.

Sunday dawned, a lot of us were moving pretty stiffly , Miles took us for walk and through some excercises to warm up for the day. More slow speed stuff and we had some great fun with the braking excercises, it’s bloody amazing how much grip you actually have on grass. The demo Miles gave us had our tongues hanging on the ground, crash stops from full noise into the most amazing rolling stoppies. Onto the trails in the hills we did some creek crossings, worked on the correct way to ride drainage humps and bike positioning on the trail. After lunch we were onto the speedway oval for some practice in sliding round corners and proper body and weight positioning (there’s that one again)
at faster speeds. Riding over obstacles was next with a course set out with tyres we had to ride over, I found it hard to get the throttle and body weight coordinated well in lifting the front whee but others had no trouble. The last thing we did was another ride up the single track hillclimb loop again and then it was time to pack up , get our certificates and course manual DVD’s , thank Miles and Jason and ride home. The 4 hour cold ride home in the dark , being bloody sore and tired , was the final chapter in a great weekend. Everyone Ive talked to who did the course really enjoyed it and learnt a lot and would do it again. It’s hard to distill the course into a few paragraphs in this story but what it basically is about is that correct use of body and weight postioning with smooth controlled use of the throttle, brakes and clutch will conquer just about anything you come up against, of course you have to practice all this and that was what the course was all about. Do yourself a favour and do a course, it will improve your riding experience heaps. I’ll be certainly organising another course next year.


Chief instructor Miles Davis



Some of the riders