A nice day for a duck!

Everything Supermoto Trackday @ Three Sisters Circuit, Wigan. Thursday Mikey and I began travelling up to Wigan to attend a test day trackday at Three Sisters on the Friday. We packed up our supermotos in out transit van and headed off! First stop, the boat. A massive hindrance of being on the island is to get on and off of it you need to jump onto the car ferry before starting your journey onto the 'mainland', the ferry crossing usually takes around an hour and bit of water called The Solent in-between the Island and the rest of England is renowned for being one of the most expensive ferry crossings in the world, not ideal when you have plans to begin racing. We finally made it to Southampton and grabbed some breakfast before we set off up the motorway, we had allowed ourselves a bit of time to travel up to Wigan (aprox 5 hrs up from Southampton) so on the way up we took a little detour to Jeremey Clarkson's Diddly Squat Farm Shop, it was rammed and it was chucking down with rain so we didn't stay for too long which was a shame. We then continued our journey up the motorway, this is where our journey became a bit of a nightmare! We ended up going through a toll road accidentally, paying £12.60 to take the transit through which we weren't best pleased about but we couldn't turn round by that point so it just was what it was. We travelled a couple of miles along the M6 until suddenly it came to a standstill...for 51/2 hours! It had turned out that a lorry had overturned and spilt its fuel everywhere so we were ready to camp on the motorway for the night the way it was looking. We finally arrived at our campsite in Wigan at about 11pm...just a few hours later than our estimated arrival time of 4.30pm! It was pitch black, windy and raining and we had to put an awning up so we could take the bikes out of the van so we could sleep in the back, it was an absolute nightmare, we actually had to apologise to our campsite neighbours in the morning due to the choice of language we were using setting up the stupid awning in the dark! The lady just laughed and said it was fine and thought we were both quite funny. We had a good night sleep in our little tranny van and felt a little bit more alive in the morning...a 6am start to start getting up and ready, take the awning down and pack everything back into the back of the van to travel around 25minutes to the track. The awning was a pain again and we got to the track just after 8am. Once at the track we began unloading, spoke to some familiar faces and made some new friends, we then went to sign on and were issued our wristbands. We'd pulled the bikes out ready to get on the track for the first session then...BAM...rain, rain, rain, rain, rain! Do you know what is really good when its raining...wet tyres!! Which we didn't have! (Not through not wanting them but we just hadn't manage to afford a set each a the moment and we are considering selling our bikes to fund more competitive ones next year so seemed a bit outlay for not much gain at the moment) Anyway some familiar faces in the paddock kindly let us borrow their immaculately set up FS450s with wets on for the first session, riding them was like a warm knife through butter they were effortless and didn't even consider twitching in the wet even with a 16" wheel on the front. After the first session out, it was still a little wet for our road tyres and we were pretty hungry after our wild travel up the night before. We stopped for a bit of breakfast in the café (which was lovely by the way) and assessed how the track was looking through the windows. It was drying a little, not much but a little bit drier if we went out and took it easy on our road tyres (or so I thought!) We finally got out on our own supermotos on our road tyres, like I said the track was drying but it was in patches and still a little bit greasy and pooled water in places. A done a few warm up laps on my CRF to try and get some warmth in the tyres and then I started getting in the groove, my bike felt like an old donkey after riding the nicely set up the Husky, I came into a corner with a few of the boys, opened the throttle and WOOMP! Bike spun up and spat me straight off, I was fine and got straight but but I lost a peg slider on impact and my handguard on my clutch side was now drooping, I managed to pick the bike up but couldn't get the bloody thing back into neutral and I can't kick the bike over again without standing on something as i'm too short and need to be able to get over the piston to give it a good boot. Luckily for me the Marshalls were super good and let the session continue on a yellow whilst to the side Mikey come over and swapped bikes with me (him being 6ft 3 has his advantages of being able to kickstart!) I rode Mikeys KTM500 back to the pits and he rode my CRF. We put my bike up on the stand and assessed the damage, pretty minimal, I reattached the hand guard but I didn't have any more peg sliders and I needed them to be able to go onto the track. Kindly one of the riders who I was out on the track with come over to see if I was ok, I showed him the damage to the biker and he said he saw my peg slider come off but he had some spare ones in his van that I could have, we chucked him and tenner, fitted the peg slider and borrowed a hacksaw from the resident kart mechanics and that was it I was back in action! I done a few more sessions in the mornings and then the track stopped for lunch around 12.30pm. 1pm, the track came to life again and this time the sessions were running over the 'table top', now i've never ridden over a table top and one of my friends said to me its fine you can just roll up to it and over. So, first table top session out we are at the front, Mikey is following me, I come up to it fairly quick thinking it wasn't that big...how wrong was I! I hit this table top at a rate of knots and it threw me straight up in the air! Mikey was behind me and said it looked like I went about 4ft up lol! Anyway, after the first heart pounding jump, you kinder get used to it and how hard you could hit it and its really good fun! The later afternoon sessions were ruined by heavy showers again and a poor rider knocked himself out following a big highside on the track in one of our afternoon sessions (later updated that he was ok just a fractured collarbone) but this meant that the track was postponed momentarily whilst they waited for a ambulance to take the rider to hospital. We all milled about for a bit and it began raining again, I decided to call it a day as I knew we had a another long drive back to the island again and I was starting to ache a little from my unscheduled pit stop earlier in the morning; Mikey went out for one more session whilst I began packing up the van. Once all packed away we said bye to our friends and made the longer journey back home. The trip home was a lot more successful that on the way up but it always feels even longer when you are tired. We thought we could made the 10pm boat but then it turned out that there wasn't one and the next one was 11.55pm, so we causally drove down..got to the ferry terminal just after ten and had a little snooze in the van for an hour, we then had our hour boat ride..finally returning home around 1am in the morning! A suuuuuper long journey and a bit of a hassle but we had a great time despite all the events, got to see familiar faces and made some new friends. The paddock is really helpful and they never made you feel inadequate, everyone is fully supportive. The marshalls were fab throughout the whole day, getting to know us and giving us heads up on things like taking wind into consideration over the table top. A really organised day, I would definitely recommend it to anyone.