Mary River National park

More for artistic effect than information - I actually took the picture because it was possible to see the moon and sun simultaneusly, but the auto exposure is dominated by the sun, which makes the moon hard to find. It is there, on the left. This is Leichhardt Point, in the Mary River National Park, the edge of a large billabong/wetland. It's a good spot for birds, although you need good binoculars. Our best bird was a bee-eater, with a truly stunning green front. There were lots of grebes (lesser), and cormorants, darters, ducks, and kites. Light and camera not really up to pictures though. My phone does do a fair job with closeups, and, perhaps not spectacular, the ground is very

interesting. Not that I know what I'm looking at, but the more you look, the more there is - witness the curious flat-leaved reddish plants above (I started by photographing the flowers).

The extremity of the dry/wet contrast amazes me; no subtle gradations. Less than 100 meters from the wetland is this view, termite-mound dominated, dry grass and struggling trees to (deceptively) the horizon. Not that everything is brown; looking down, another small flat spot of colour. The rangers did some backburning one of the nights we stayed. This brown grass burns beautifully, but there was never enough of it for a fully fledged conflagration. Some low lying water, a sudden stand of established trees, and the fire is gone.

Ord River - Kununurra

Liz was planning to go to the Ord River with her DAS (previous dragon boating club) mates, and I thought I'd tag along for a comeback half-marathon, which was serendipitously scheduled for the same weekend. Unfortunately it was rescheduled (or maybe I had misread the dates/year), so I ended up settling for a 20km walk on the day. That was good, anyway, and didn't have any risk of damaging old injuries. Plus walking in Kununurra heat is a non-trivial form of exercise.

I had about 5 cameras in my hands while taking this shot - it's most of the crews of the 7 boats that took part in the marathon itself getting themselves organised for the final photograph. Shooting into the sunset wasn't such a clever idea. You can make out the Ord in the background - it's pretty wide here, about 2km upriver from Diversion Dam - and in the far right background you can see what's on the other side of the river. Vast expanses of not much.

 In fact, although I didn't get over that side of the river, I'd be pretty happy to bet that it looked like this, which is the view walking from town to the caravan park where we stayed, about 2.5 km. Pretty much every view looks like this.

Sometimes there are lumps. Usually not. That's the main highway you see in the foreground; right to Katherine and left to Wyndham/Broome. I'm on the bike track, which is a bit of a puzzle really. It goes from the edge of town to the Diversion Dam barrier wall. Approximately 4 km. Maybe there was once an engineer who liked cycling, and a town council that liked the engineer. Who knows? But it was good for running for me, and a few locals in training as well.

Sadly I didn't get to meet the linguist/manager here; it was closed 2 of the 3 days I had free, and he(?) was busy on the day when we both managed to be there. Saving languages is a highly worthwhile aim - I don't know how practical/useful it ultimately will be, but if it's possible then it has to be tried. Of course it's a highly complex project, because a language that is, in some sense, propped up, is a language acquiring some of the ethos of the propping process. But in the same way that a species remains a species, despite some subset of adaptation/mutation, a language can to.

This is one of the few lumps - Kelly's Knob is the only name I spotted for it. It's being slowly worn away by fig trees, erosion and grasses, but the fig trees make the best pictures. Looking at the stratification in the stone it's obviously been underwater for a long part of its life - and it turns right back into sand if walking around it is any kind of valid testimony - extraordinary evidence of a time when Australia was much smaller than it is today.

 Three views of Mt Cyril (sic), all taken with the same camera and within 20 minutes of each other. It's remarkable how the colours change so dramatically. We didn't go climbing here, because:

•  it was too hot
•  the rock is apparently very soft/breakable
•  it looked pretty easy to get lost, and 
•  it was too hot.

We proved point 3 by getting lost, all the while

 remaining on the road which appeared to be marked on the map. When I say "lost", it was more a case of ending up back in suburbia rather than in the middle of the "Hidden Valley", known locally as the mini-Bungles. We were able to tell from the air when leaving that mini-Bungles is a reasonable name - it's not so easy to tell from the ground, although if you got properly lost you might get the idea.

We proved points 1 and 4 by drinking abut 4 litres of water in 2 hours, as well as multiple ice-creams back in the caravan park.

The taxi driver who took ius home didn't understand what hwe were doing, walking around Kununurra. "Nothing to see", he said, "I only stay here for the fishing".

Recently...

This is Rhodes at 6:00 AM, early Spring, when it was still hot. Hard to believe it's a post-industrial wasteland. That water is so toxic they won't allow fishing in it. If I rotated the camera 180 degrees you'd see a shopping mall & office block with no redeeming architectural merit. Truly, happiness in life is the product of tunnel vision, partial blindness and the ability to see the world like a salesman desperate for the first commission of the month.

The dawn haze is probably dust & fumes from the out of shot freeway. Still looks nice though, doesn't it.

More selective viewing from the Tempe Motor Boat Association moorings.

No sign of the airport, the Princes Highway. It's a beautiful piece of the world, strangely. Hard to see, but unmistakably there once seen. Because Liz and I are
down here regularly,  I like to find new things to see. The red is quite striking, in contrast with the white, and the surface of the water belies the famous Cooks River  toxins. There's no wind, and that makes the reflection particularly appealing.

 This has apeared at Garrison Point recently (which I think I've mentioned elsewhere, and was the location of my second cycling video). It's a very striking piece about the relationship between indigenous and colonised; it looks like it is intended to appear kinetic while not actually moving - certainly the wind was strong enough to make any reasonably balanced and bearing'ed windmill turn, and this has an interior that looks like an axle. However, it's is seriously solid. Maybe it needs a hurricane (Hornsby had  tornado recently, so it's not impossible). Maybe it need a wind strong enough to evict the colonisers...

 Also seen at Garrison Point was this guy, stalking around somewhat tentatively. It's a masked lapwing, so far as I know. Part of the chain of reserves along the Georges river through this part of Sydney is Lake Gillawarna, which is an extraordinary reserve, densely packed with a few species of the larger water birds. Ibis, mainly, which are a bit of a pest although you can't blame them for adapting successfully to techno-urban living. It's not like it was their idea to invent garbage bins and concentrate all the water is limited areas. But I'm sure they make it tough on smaller birds. (Speaking of which, I took a bunch of the students along the TVT from Bardwell Park to Tempe Station; we were luck to see a

couple of red-browed firetails - although they were moving too quickly for photographs, so I wouldn't argue with anyone who said different).

Finally, a tap. I may have finally got the manual aperture to work on my way-too-automatic camera, because this has the exact shallow depth of field I was looking for. I like taps. I took a very similar picture at Tallowa Dam, as I recall. Below is the opposite shot, although this was an accident with the auto focus. I'm sure there's art in the combination of them, somehow.

Taree 2013

The trip to Taree is about 350 km and if you get away from Sydney quickly it's a pretty easy trip up the freeway to Newcastle & then back on the upgraded Pacific Highway - which is a disgraceful excuse for a road except where upgraded, BTW - for the final stages. It's wet country, lots of rivers and bush which probably merit further exploration, but it's also motorboat country, which makes the waterways a lot less appealing. It's also school-holiday territory; myriads of cheap motels, caravan parks and truly appalling food. Our motel was fine, if a little 2-star, and the host was really genuinely warm.

I discovered a "panorama" function on the camera, which solves the wide-angle problem nicely; this is the bank of the Manning River, with the marquees of the better-organised clubs set up along the bank. The gap between the white and orange tents is the allocated space for us - we weren't quite on top of the organisation and logistics department.

Liz was paddling for a combined Penrith/Sandy Point team; pretty much the only Sydney teams there. Dragon boating is, somewhat bizarrely, Australia's fastest growing sport (off a very small base, I guess) and it's startling how many rural areas have one or two (it seems to be a very political sport, there's hardly a club that wasn't born out a split with another club) crews. Macleay River ended up winning all three divisions (Open, Womens & Mixed),  defeating one of two Newcastle clubs in each of the finals. I've

never heard of the Macleay River! They paddle, I'm informed, in the "Russian style", that is, low rate (around 60 strokes a minute) with a lot of power. Hunter Dragons use an "Asian style", around 80+ strokes a minute.

Liz' boat did pretty well, considering they could only put 16 paddlers into 20 seats, plus they had 3 paddlers at their first regatta. They improved each race, and they beat their own targets. If a couple of races had been 20 metres longer they would have finished higher, but they didn't quite manage to tie their finishing sprints.

Note the nice parallel lines of the leading two paddlers.

Saturday night we had the regatta dinner at the local club; possibly the worst food I've paid for in a long long time, although the steak wasn't completely abominable. Still, next time we're there we might try the Indian food. I did hear, once I got back to Sydney, that there's a wood-fired pizza place about 5km out of town (trying to avoid the health department) which is very good, but it's not easy to believe. Still, the people were pleasant, and food isn't everything, despite Masterchef and various bake-off-based reality TV shows.

We got away at about 12:30 Sunday - the regatta was superbly run - and were back in Sydney around 5, so another pretty good trip. The right glute was a bit sore from all that driving; sadly, my physio says that isn't going to go away, but it's a lot better now than it was before the treatment, plus I can run at pretty much full pace now. Last week I managed three consecutive runs; this week I'll try for four. Anyway, Hawkesbury's coming! And sailing will be back on the agenda soon, if this weather keeps up.

A quick trip around Sydney Park

parkrun - 2 

Beautiful morning, nice run, felt much stronger than the last one. Not that my perception of how I'm running, and the actual data, ever seem to match particularly well. I forgot the turn off the device as I came over the line, so I'll have to wait for the organisers to tell me my time. But the first 4k were definitely faster.

And I came 78th! Last time it was 80th!

Garrison Point

I had a few problems with the video technology, so I don't have the whole 20k trip, but this is one for the fragments (speeded up to avoid tedium) from my comeback bike ride. I've been off the bike for most of the rehab from the torn hamstring origin because the hamstring wasn't really comfortable with effort under compression. This trip was a bit of a tester, the day after my first continuous run, and top speed is about running speed - so the sped up video is still slower than Tour de France pace.

Cabramatta Creek was the tributary that got me lost; I set off on one side of the Georges River assuming that if I crossed the river at some point, and kept the river on the same side of me (left, as it happened, I was cycling widdershins) I would get back to the start. I didn't think about tributaries - if I'd kept this on the left I'd have ended up in god knows where (well, actually, Cabramatta). Fortunately, I got suspicious and had the mobile phone with universal street directory, and so was able to plot a way back to the car.

Garrison Point (below) was probably first spotted by white guys when Matthew Flinders sailed up the Georges River, which he did in a 12 foot (that's 1 foot longer than my dinghy, and about 3 feet shorter than Liz's canoe, and he sailed/rowed in it from Port Jackson out of the Heads, down to Botany Bay, and then up to roughly Bankstown) skiff as practice for his later trip down the East coast. I can recommend his diary - I read it on my phone (you can get if for free as an e-book, I guess the Kindle would have access to it) - as it's extraordinarily matter of fact. It's full of details, and helps quite a lot to clarify how resourceful a successful explorer needed to be.

Bankstown hasn't really benefited from being Sydney's first inland settlement. It's a very raggedy-ann suburb, main roads, secondary airports, warehouses and cheap housing. You'd think having a quite decent river in a place as water-view-sensitive as Sydney would've been enough to make it a prestige suburb, but it just hasn't quite made it. Strange. It isn't making much of its history either, but perhaps, since a lot of that history was agricultural, it has been largely erased.

Be that as it may, this section of the Georges River, Garrison Point, Chipping Norton, and Prospect Creek is very pleasant, and likewise popular. Apart from winter, any weekend here is busy with picnickers, fishermen, runners, cyclists, motor boat enthusiasts, canoeists and indeed, I saw a R/C yacht club racing somewhere along my path.

(I googled Garrison Point; it is allegedly the spot that Bass & Flinders disembarked, although the name came later)

In fact I ran a race here last year, at Mirrambeena Reserve (everything seems to have multiple names - I think each name attracts funding from a different piece of legislation) and there is a serious running club based here which organises regular runs; you can see the course markings at some places on the Garrison Point video. There is a ton of birdlife; there's an island which is by way of being a bit of a bird reserve. I can't speak with any authority on the vegetation, except that I suspect it is very largely re-plantings. The only tree that I recognise is the pretty much inevitable casuarina. They don't let a lot grow around them once they settle in, their leaf litter is pretty toxic.

I was pretty surprised by how quiet it was, really, because it was a glorious afternoon. On the other hand, it may have been more glorious than the forecast, and it's not a place you can easily pop down to - it's part of Car World.

I was very surprised - very unpleasantly surprised - when after about 12 km I caught sight of Warwick Farm racecourse. I don't have a very unified map of Sydney in my mind; I know it in pieces and the pieces don't fit together very well. I know Warwick Farm well from when we first moved to Sydney - but in my mind it was nowhere near where I thought we were. Well, obviously it was, but it was a quite a surprise to me. Irritatingly, there is a bike path along the river on the maps, but Warwick Farm has a fence that prevents bicycles from actually accessing it, so I had to cycle around the racetrack on a couple of substantially main roads. I suppose I should consider my success a confidence booster for daily commuting, but it takes a certain degree of obliviousness. In a way there's no point being careful - it's not the cyclist that's particularly relevant in the physics of being hit by a truck - but despite that I prefer to concentrate for all I'm worth in case that proves to be useful. Quite stressful, but, to be fair, no-one tried to hit me.

It's amazing how committed to the car some places are - great chunks of road don't even bother with footpaths, because who would walk there? Of course, they're right, even though it does seem like a self fulfilling policy. No-one would walk next to a 6 lane highway. Naturally, when the road came into being, people didn't need footpaths, because they could walk on the roads.

Eventually anyway, I made it back to the car just in time to help Liz out of the water. I hadn't been planning to ride quite so far, but I was pleased to have made it without any leg problems.

Sailing away (1)

I'm learning to sail. I had two lessons from a professional during which it became apparent that I wasn't going to excel at this any time soon. I hate that. I like being a promising student, but in a boat, I'm just inept. I think I'll be coining new words for inept by the time I've finished.

My strategy is therefore to skulk off and practice by myself for a while. When I get up to the level of a typical two-lesson student, I'll go back for lesson three. Since a lesson costs $160, it's the only sensible thing to do; I can probably buy a small yacht for the price of learning to sail it. I've compromised and picked up a small dinghy (2nd hand from Balmoral Sailing Club) for something less than the price of learning to tack. Martin (a handy colleague from school) and I spent Saturday AM building a dolly for it out of offcuts from the theatrical set-builder's studio around the corner, and Monday I took it out solo for the first time.

Home made dolly

So, there's a lot to wrap the trainee sailor's mind around. First, the good news - some things don't matter as much as you might think. Rigging a boat is quite tricky, but there's quite a lot you can get wrong and the thing still goes. I'm not saying it wouldn't go better if all the rigging was right, but I've "experimented" with three ways of attaching the sail, and I'm pleased to say that the most recent - which I worked out by myself and appears to bear no resemblance to either of the two instruction manuals I found online - is clearly right. To be fair to the manual writers, I'm pretty sure that I'll go back and read one of them again (I think there are actually different riggings over the 57 year history of the design) and realise that I completely failed to understand what it clearly and simply explained the first time. Anxiety can do that to you.

My dinghy has a halyard (to hold the top of the sail up) and a downhaul (to hold the bottom of the sail down) - don't go sailing based on these instructions! - plus a horse aka a traveller, which attaches the mainsheet to the deck and also seems to hold down the tiller, as well as a vang, which I think might be a kicker in the manual, and of course, a cunningham, possibly the more poetic name for the outhaul. That's five lines and eight names. Thanks to a generously minded passing onlooker, who waded in when he realised that on-shore coaching wouldn't be adequate, I've discovered that your vang, downhaul and cunningham can all be less tight that recommended without seriously inconveniencing a sailor of my expertise. In fact, given that I capsized AFTER fixing all these minor details, loose rigging doesn't appear to be wholly disadvantageous. Plus, you can have a tangled horse and a very wrong mainsheet and still actually sail from A to B - so long as you define B as the point you get to after leaving A and eventually deciding to go no further. (There's no shame in walking the boat back to the landing ramp - but remember to hold it by the bow!)

So, rigging is less critical than you might think. And like everything, one failed attempt to do it by myself was worth three or four attempts to follow someone else's instructions and/or example. I'm pretty sure I will get the thing exactly right next time. Well, maybe the time after. And even for all the mistakes, the only one with a real mechanical failing was the mainsheet, which I failed to rig to exploit the mechanical advantage of the block and tackle involved. Here my gym-related diligence probably paid off - I'm a lot stronger than I used to be - more than a 2:1 mechanical advantage, maybe.

Anyway, rigged, tick. Launched, tick. Thanks to Martin for the dolly-building and the old guy who didn't speak English who helped me launch and watched my shoes. I was able to un-launch later by myself, so I think a couple more goes with the dolly and I'll be right in both directions. In a way, the trickiest thing is keeping hold of the boat while getting the dolly back out of the water.

The rigging is, in fact, the trivial part of the exercise. The boat on the water is vastly more difficult. The first problem is fluky winds. I was at Rodd Point, and I'm pretty sure the wind on the point was not blowing in the same direction as the wind on the water. It certainly wasn't blowing as hard near the shore as it was 50 meters out, although an alternative scenario is that it took me 50 meters to get the boat, rudder and sail pointing simultaneously in the right direction. Once done, however, the thing took off, beam reaching (probably) up a storm until I decided to change direction. Then, and I've no idea how, since I'm sure I decided to gybe, I found myself "in irons", which means facing windward (as in tacking, not gybeing), and consequently, not moving. This means I must have tacked by mistake, and I know I've always had trouble with left and right, but even calling them port and starboard can't convince me that I did actually head starboard. I suspect that in fact I had managed to "beam reach" myself on to a windward tack, because let me tell you that knowing where you are and what direction you are travelling in is, strictly speaking, impossible. To start with, the boat doesn't travel particularly in the line you are pointing the rudder, unless perhaps you're sailing downwind. Probably every sailor knows that - I think it's physics, but it's not very intuitive. It seems like you're sort of sliding/skidding across the water; whether or not it's possible to keep a straight wake, and what it would mean if you did, I haven't fathomed* yet. (*Nautical pun alert) To add complexity to this is the fact that the boat wants, in the Aristotelian sense of the word, to head upwind. That is, to stop. The goal of all those forces acting on the boat is to reduce themselves to zero. It's a battle out there. I want to go somewhere; the boat doesn't. That kind of behaviour is exactly what I don't like about horses, and I'm sure no-one ever mentioned it about boats. Maybe the boat got me in irons before I decided I wanted to gybe. Maybe I gybed through 270 degrees (no, it's possible, I never wrote up my first lesson, but trust me, you can gybe a long way), who knows. Anyway, I felt like a dill, doing nothing at all in the middle of nowhere very much, but I do in fact know what to do in this situation, sort of. One up for voracious reading: you sail backwards until you are going fast enough to sail forwards. Knowing it isn't quite enough to make it sound plausible, and doing it seemed a lot more like waiting for something to happen (which it eventually did), but another bout of incompetence circumvented made me feel quite cheerful.

There's a lot more...can one blog entry stand it? Note this is a short 1 hour episode, not a multi-day epic.

I'm sorry there are no pictures, but my sporting self-glorification camera isn't waterproof, so I wasn't wearing it. Sadly that means my spectacular capsize, and surprisingly semi-competent righting of the boat went unrecorded. I'm glad I've spent the last 6 months learning to swim properly, because it's one less thing to worry about; in point of fact swanning around in salt water in a life jacket isn't particularly difficult, but if you're as stressed by water as I was 6 months ago it's hard to find the mental energy to work out exactly what to do next. Righting the boat may not be difficult, but getting back into it while it tries to sail itself (or capsize again) requires a bit of thought/good fortune. Like everything, I know more about this for next time. I rather think that the first sailing lesson should be( 1) how to capsize & (2) just try to sail, followed by a prolonged debriefing. Well, I've always liked learning that way. I'm not very good at turning theory into practice - I'm much better at enlightening practice with retrospective theory. Of course, that's all very well and good, but I still have to work out how to gybe (risk of capsize) or tack (risk of stalling) or I'll be condemned to sail in straight lines for ever.

I haven't mentioned recognising the buoys that warn you about shallow water, avoiding windsurfers and canoes, sticky centreboards, detachable tillers and ... no, I think that's about it. Oh, wait, I didn't finish the bit about knowing where you are...not only does the boat want to steer in its own direction, plus the wind shifts around in a superficially random way, but water all looks the same in every direction. Unless you pay a lot of attention to landmarks you could sail in circles (except that you can't actually sail in a circle) for eternity.

But, lest it all sounds a bit horrendous, let me note that the bits in between the bits described here, the bits where your're bumping along at what seems like quite a reasonable speed (walking is quicker, but sailing feels faster), are fantastic. And coping with stuff going wrong is very cheerful after you get home and under a hot shower. So, apparently, there's no downside - although I haven't been thumped in the head by a boom yet. And it's good to have water at the end of summer, it would be a lot colder in January (It has to do with currents, apparently).

I can't quite see myself racing yet, but I can see myself wanting to try.

(On a related note, I started Matthew Flinders' diary over the Easter weekend, courtesy Gutenburg (free e-books) and am/was shocked at the navigational challenges of the 17th and 18th centuries. It wasn't impossible for charts to be out by 10 degrees - as much as 600 nautical miles. OK, Australia's big enough to bump into anyway, but what bit of it were you bumping into? Even once longitude got sorted out, theoretically, people couldn't afford the chronometers. Cook used the rival "lunar distance" method, which wasn't much chop either. Running into islands must have been more good luck that good management.)

(Plus, drinking water...I'd assumed evaporation would have been standard, but Flinders talks admiringly about somebody's "ingenious device", meaning a desalination still, so it clearly wasn't common)