RIDERS ON THE STORM

It’s said a picture can paint a thousand words but the little black cloud with four diagonal lines coming out of it next to the Bureau of Meteorology’s forecast for Thursday could never have hoped to do justice to the hammering we were about to receive. We’d had the day in our diary for a while and, like every diligent motorcyclist, had been watching the weather closely. The whole week was meant to be dry, but the tail end of Cyclone Debbie had a much different scenario in store for us.

At one point, as we approached the top of a long, steep hill, a solid white wall stretched left to right across the entire visible horizon. For a few seconds I thought it was fog before realising I was looking at a vertical line where a near impenetrable curtain of rain began. We hit it at a goodly clip and it was suddenly like being in a paintball version of Custer’s Last Stand. I can’t remember the last time it actually hurt to be riding in the rain but this was something way beyond just rain. I thought I was already pretty wet, given we’d been riding in near constant drizzle since early morning, but apparently I was mistaken; within about