West Coast 4x4 and the Nissan 4WD Owners Club of WA ran a second training day on the dunes near Lancelin for novice 4WD'ers. Again, this was a great day and everyone I spoke to was having a good time and learnt something along the way.

This time, due to many people not being able to attend the previous training day and an article in the West Australian we had a huge turnout. 55 participant vehicles plus at least (I wasn't counting) 12 members cars were there. Parking at our initial gathering point was a nightmare... :-)

Anyways, here are some photos from the day. Not too many this time from me - I spent most of the day yakking to people about sand driving. Once again, we assembled at the Tenth Light Horse trail north of Wanneroo. I missed the notice on the Nissan 4WD Owners Club site about the revised departure time, so I got up early, braved the cold and was there just after 7AM. Our enthusiastic participants started rolling up at 7:15AM so this wasn't such a bad thing, but we had to hang around a while because departure didn't happen until just before 8:30AM.

In any case, with around 50 cars rolling up it got crowded really quickly...

As before, we divided everyone up into a few groups and sent them up to Lancelin in convoy. Once there, we gathered around for a chat about the day and safety things (like tyre pressure) before heading off to the various exercise areas.

Keith and I did the sand driving chat this time that Ed did before. We talked to people about tyre pressures, safety, speed and all that sort of good stuff and then took then around a short course which had some hard and soft sand in it. Not incredibly hard but still useful - especially for those out for their first time.

With that done, we escorted them through a slightly harder track to the next exercise which was the hill climb and descent area. On the way there, there is a small gully that needs to be negotiated. It's quite firm on the way down but pretty soft on the way out and consequently needs a little bit of speed going in and a fair amount of throttle at exit.

Being sand, there were a few bumps there and cars with independant front end suspension were hitting the bottom pretty hard. Our second group had a Nissan X-Trail in it and on its way through there was a big crunch from the front and the number plate flipped under the car to land in the gully. Whoops. :-)

Our third group of the day had another X-Trail. So, we dutifully told them the story of the first one and they took it a little easier through the gully. A big crunch ensued and sure enough, their number plate ended up in the sand too.

Oh well, I guess we were after consistency in any case. :-)

At the end of the day we lined everyone up for a photo shoot. Having tried to do this last time and ending up with a line that was too long for most cameras, we tried doing this with three lines. After some organising, re-organising and re-re-organising we pretty much got it done.