Salamanca 6 Hour Challenge - April 2006.

The Salamanca 6 Hour Challenge involved making or adapting a Human Powered Vehicle then racing around a tight circuit, the team with the most laps wins.

Designing, constructing, adapting and racing - Craig was in his element.

Dad

Craig and I off for our first overnight bush walk. By the look on my face and my stance I would say I felt pretty proud that I was off on a ‘serious expedition’ with the best guy I knew. Craig made my backpack himself and I think I carried it for about 100 meters and got tired so he just popped it inside his pack, I guess it wasn’t too heavy after all! We walked to Pelverata Falls and camped overnight on the way. It was also my first night away from mum so Craig took off his blundstone boot, told me it was a phone and I ‘called’ home had a chat with mum and happily went to sleep. This memory sums up how I always feel about Craig

From Jenny Scott

During all the years I knew Craig through sea kayaking, including working with him on the Tas Sea Canoeing Club committee, I greatly admired and liked him.  We tended to have a fairly combative relationship - I don’t like being bossed around much!  - but it was always with mutual liking amidst the prodding and teasing and testing.  He was a very generous-hearted person, and for all the reasons which so many people have mentioned already, you couldn’t help but warm to him.  The most recent time I spent with Craig was completely brilliant, and completely made up for any past prodding and teasing.  It was on Roydon Island in the Furneaux group (Flinders Island) in May last year at one of the fantastic working bees run by FOBSI, the Friends of Bass Strait Islands Wildcare group.  We were tackling big out-of-control  boxthorn bushes – huge untidy masses the size of a shed, and often taller.  They had been semi-bulldozed a few years back, but not completely killed, and the regrowth had grown up all through great piles of dead branches and then got covered with native creepers.  Messy and challenging – and acres of it, all intertwining together.  Craig and I worked as a team of two, him with chainsaw and me with loppers, and both with poison.  It was great, and for me a real privilege.  We would discuss our strategy with each one, walking around it poking and thinking, then get into it with huge energy.  All around us others were doing the same, and the slope was filled with the roaring of chainsaws and flying branches of cut boxthorn. We would get down to the final stumps, then crouch in the dirt and systematically and rapidly work through the cutting and poisoning in a co-ordinated dance of loppers and dabbers.  Nice.  And all the way through, despite the chain-sawing, we managed to fit in a huge amount of talk and discussion on every topic under the sun.  At the end of each day we would all trudge down the slope to the hut, covered in sweat and dirt, and race down to the beach for a cold dip before dinner.  Some of us, anyway.  At night in the hut Kat and Donna-Lee would be tinkling away on their ukuleles and others would be getting stuck into making crochet squares for a Roydon Island rug.  Craig became restive, having neither an instrument nor a crochet needle (although, as Karen noted, he didn’t think much of crochet and much preferred knitting). So he set to work to make some knitting needles.  The twigs on the island just weren’t up to scratch.  But old chain-saw files, a different matter. After unsuccessfully trying to file away the rough bits, he wound grey tape around them – success – and proceeded to knit a few squares for the rug.  Which now is a wonderful and useful item in the hut.

Fabulous to know you, Craig, and amazing just how many people you inspired along the way.

Craig and Col moving Roydon Island water tank May 2012.

Craig knitting with chain saw files.