Amy 1 - Sharks 0

This past Sunday dawned sunny and relatively warm so we packed up some friends and headed out for an afternoon on the boat.

Trying not to relax too hard...

Since it's still early spring actually getting into the water is still out of the question so we continued our onslaught on the fish population.

Demonstrating the proper fishing posture while on a boat

Don't worry - in the past 7 months of trying we've so far only caught one fish that was big enough to eat. Since we all know that fishing is a long process we settled in with some beers and snacks for the long haul. Just as James was admonishing the girls for our slack fishing technique and Webs was complaining that we'd only caught one fish in 3 hours we had some excitement.

Who's excited to go for a swim now??

So now we've conclusively answered the question that there are sharks in the river - we'll just assume that it's just the babies and that we won't meet this little guy's parents!

Are you (at least) as cool as my brother?

Ok everyone, it's time to some some serious soul searching as my brother has purchased his tickets to come visit us down under.

Yup - he's barefooting - pretty cool huh?

Are you going to let him be the coolest one un-contested or are you going to jump on the band wagon and purchase your tickets?

The Fish are Scared Now

This weekend we upped our fishing game by adding a boat to the mix. Although the weather was looking a bit dodgy we decided that the fish wouldn't mind getting wet so we went out to prove to them that we're just as tough as they are.

It's hard to dodge this many rain drops!

Thankfully the weather cleared out a bit and we continued our mission of showing the fish who's boss. Laughing at the foolish fish who clearly have no chance.

Debs and James decided that they wanted to do all of the fish catching so while Chris and I watched our bait dissapear with out a bite they proceeded to catch a record 7 fish!
James is clearly pleased with his day.

None of them were big enough for dinner (Deb's first catch might have actually been a good candidate for a fish bowl), but coupled with the fact that we didn't have a single snag we call the day a success and raced home before the daylight faded.
The race to the dock before darkness is on...

The day was topped off with the requisite burgers on the grill (or bar-b as they would remind me to say here) plus some exquisite homebrewed porter on tap.

Anyone for bowls?

Kat bowling, everyone else preparing in the back

This past weekend Amy and I were transported into proper Australia/English society by being taken by our friends to a Lawn Bowls Club in North Manly. Lawn bowling is generally the province of retirees and aristocrats but they got us in the door with the offer of jugs of beer and trash talking.

Lawn Bowling is played on an immaculately manicured rectangular court and is most similar to bocce ball whit the goal being to roll your balls closest to a smaller, off-color ball. The biggest difference between lawn bowling and bocce is that the balls you throw with are ellipsoid, rather than round and weighted to one side to facilitate curved throws.

Lawn bowling Gatorade

Amy and I quickly took on the role of kingmaker, being better at knocking other teams' balls out rather than actually being able to land ours the closest.

Debs: The Terminator of Lawn Bowls

Add in jugs of beer to the intense competitive nature of our group and it led to some memorable showdowns.

We followed up the day with a bbq at Kat and Web's place that led to over eating and the next even for the day, the introduction America's next great cultural export, of beer pong to the southern hemisphere.

Finally, after hours of failing at goddamn lawn bowls, we were back in our home territory.

Our non-yankee friends took quickly to the game and the smack talk and psyche outs flowed like water.

James on the psyche-out defense, Amy: Cool as ice

Let the game now spread like wildfire across the continent.

Sunday we ventured out to the RSL (Returned and Services League (similar to the Veteran's Association in the US) at Harbord Diggers to watch the UFC fight. In Australia, every community of decent size has one of these clubs and they host everything from resturants, bars, and gyms to scout troops to large events such as comedy acts and musicians. It is also common for them to house gambling operations like slot machines or sports bookies.


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It was a great place to watch the fights, there were lots of large projection screens and even stadium seating in one area. The cheap beers ($3.90 each) plus the prerequisite violence entailed in watching the fights made it a home away from home (away from home).

Sunset over Freshwater, never gets old