The forecast for this year’s Around the Bay in a Day ride was warm and windy. It turned out to be an almost perfect day to do the 250km counter-clockwise circumnavigation of Port Phillip Bay by bike.
The start was scheduled for 5:30am, but with multiple waves of 210km and 250km riders, we didn’t end up leaving until 5:50. I rode with a bunch of friends and it was a casual pace down to Queenscliff. We ended up on the 1pm ferry and by the time we disembarked in Sorrento, the north-westerly wind that had blown us down had swung around to a south-westerly that helped push us home.
This was about my tenth AtB ride (I’ve lost count) and after 21 years, it seems that Bicycle Victoria has almost figured out how to run the event properly: the rest stops were better organised (apart from the farcical lack of water in Geelong), the ferry system ran smoothly and the marshalling was excellent. Queuing for the ferry worked well: we had time for lunch and a decent coffee in town before queueing up and boarding fairly quickly, as you can see in the photo above.
It was a very uneventful ride: no punctures, the weather was great, Richard didn’t shatter a femur this year and everyone finished in fine form.
Here’s the Strava data; I measured it with my GPS watch as 240km, not the advertised 250km, and the shorter distance was consistent with what other people measured.