Up until about a month ago, Lysa Phelan was going to continue a 17-year-old tradition and head to the Murray River with her family and a large group of friends from Melbourne.
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And then the rain came.
“There’s about 15 of us, and every year we take the boats to the river,” Ms Phelan said.
“We’ve never been here before, but we saw Eppalock was at 80 per cent and we thought, you know what, we'll give it a go, we’ll come to the lake for a change.”
Owners of the Lake Eppalock Holiday Park Lisa and Peter Rose are glad they did.
When they bought the popular park five years ago it was at 106 per cent capacity.
Since then the water levels have dropped – to as low as 21.6 per cent full in June – and so have the number of holidaymakers.
“We knew it wasn't always going to be like that...we didn't realise it was going to go down so quick though,” Ms Rose said.
The Roses have spent the intervening years “drought-proofing” their lake-side retreat, by building children’s play equipment and restoring their outdoor cinema.
But this weekend has proved, once again, there’s no substitute for water.
As of this afternoon the lake was approaching 96 per cent capacity.
“We realised that, in moving forward, we'd always be heading into drought periods and so we want to try to eventually drought-proof the park to the point of where we would have people want to come to the park whether there's water here or not,” Mr Rose said.
“But it’s obviously a no-brainer, when there's water, we nearly have to turn people away.”
And Mr Rose said it wasn’t just the two of them who were happy.
They pointed to the 400 people who turned up to their park on this weekend as evidence of the power of water to make people feel good.
“Look around, it's an amazing feeling, just how good people feel in themselves, it just makes people feel happy that this water’s here.
“We know, realistically that a lot of the water is for the environment and also irrigation...but for the average person, for recreation, it’s just an amazing thing we have right now.”
Watching her 10-year-old son and husband on their boat from the shore, Ms Phelan couldn’t help but agree.
“The kids are just loving it,” she said.
“As long as they can kneeboard, they’re happy.”
Joseph Hinchliffe
Council and environment reporter at the Bendigo Advertiser.
Council and environment reporter at the Bendigo Advertiser.
