Wennie van Lint isn’t one to give up easily, and we’re extremely grateful for that, because we’ve just received another $4,500 donation from Wennie’s paddling adventures!

You might recall Wennie. We’ve told you about his support of Arrow before.

Most recently he decided to take on another big challenge to raise money for Arrow: A 250 km bridge to bridge paddle along the Murray River from Brigenbrong Bridge to Union Bridge that he attempted at the end of 2024.

He hit a few snags on that trip, quite literally, resulting in him hanging from a tree branch while his boat, now submerged, folded in half under the force of the water.

Not one to give up, Wennie put his plans on hold until Easter 2025, so that he could re-group and come back to finish what he started. And it turned into another adventure!

As it turns out, water is being pushed down the Murray to South Australia which is under severe drought, meaning that sections of Wennie’s paddle were in quite low water leading to “gravel rash” on the bottom of his boat, and having to get out and carry his kayak over a few sections.

Then on day two of this year’s attempt, the wind was so strong that it made paddling extremely difficult, so Wennie “had a serious talk with the event organiser” (himself) and decided to have the event’s support crew (his partner Tricia) rendezvous with him to give him a ride to the dam wall, from where he would finish the last leg of the event.

Tricia, however, was assuming that Wennie would be on the water for a good while and not needing her, so she had returned to Albury to kill time. On her way to meet Wennie at the new “approved-by-the-event-organiser” pick up point, Tricia got lost, and Wennie was left waiting by the roadside with his kayak not for the 45 minutes he expected, but for an hour and thirty.

Picked up and back on the water, Wennie got back into paddling the remainder of the course. He says, “the water below the weir looked very fast with a lot of eddies, but I kept upright and paddling.”

Wennie finally went under the Union Bridge bang on 2:30 pm, to a few cheers from family waiting on the riverbank, and as you would expect from someone who has lived in Melbourne for a long time, the first thing he wanted was a coffee… but as they walked into a nearby cafe — where the staff were clearly unaware of the incredible feat he had just completed — Wennie and his crew were met with another tragic setback: “I’m sorry. We closed at 2:30.”

Wennie ended up raising over $6,000 from this adventure, and has raised over $20,000 for Arrow over the last six years. What an amazing effort!

If you’d like to help Wennie help Arrow, you can donate to his fundraising page here.