Surfer's Moon

Last Sunday we were fortunate enough to have clear skies for the supermoon.  While the scientists prefer the term "perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system", I think that we'll stick to supermoon as the much cooler way to refer to it. 

Super Moon!

Before the moon came up, Chris and I took some beers down to rocks in Queenscliff to watch the surfers putting on a show for us.  For several days we'd been having massive waves with the right wind conditions and all of the good surfers in town were definitely taking advantage.  

check out the hoard of people, how are there that may good surfers around??



pretty big waves today

Pondering the best spot to jump

picture doesn't show quite how fast he's zooming along

Queenscliff Bombie, only breaks when the waves are huge

bird has the best vantage point

body boarder pretending he's good enough to be a surfer

Freshwater beach from the cliffs

 After the sun started down we headed over to the other side of the headlands to watch the moon rise over the ocean.

super moon, in pink



super moon in full color

What a great way to wrap up a weekend.

Anzac Day 2012

ANZAC Day is a national day of rememberance in Australia and New Zealand, originally to honor the members of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps who fought at Gallipoli during World War I.  This is also now intended to be a day of rememberance, similar to our veterans day, and most importantly is a day off of work and school.

While the day starts with somber dawn services at the RSLs (similar to our veterans clubs, but more of a community center) and surf clubs, like most Australian holidays this soon becomes a race to see how drunk you can get. 

At our local RSL, the Habord Diggers, where we are members of the mounties, they host the largest game of Two-up in the Southern Hemisphere.  The Aussies tell us that this is what the soldiers played in the trenches because it's essentially just betting on flipping a coin, however the wikipedia entry seems to disagree a bit.  Regardless, this is the one day a year where it's legal to play two-up, so everyone takes full advantage.

The crowd at Diggerts

After an afternoon bbq at our place with some practice rounds of two-up we moved the party over to the diggers.  This was around 4 pm, and at this point people had been drinking steadily since noon, if not earlier so the crowd was amazingly enthusiastic about the heads or tails outcome. 

The spinner in action

In this game, anyone in the crowd who wants to bet on heads holds up some denomination of money and shouts out "20 heads" or "10 on heads" until some random stranger in the crowd decides to take tails.  The person betting heads holds the money, and then the "spinner" flips the coins.  If the spinner gets three heads in a row they get some additional prize, so generally everytime that it landed heads everyone cheered, and tails was worth a boo. 

Amazingly, after hours and hours of drinking, this massive crowd was completely friendly, even with large amounts of money changing hands and no fights broke out.  After the sun went down we kicked our way through the piles of empty beer cans and champagne bottles and toasted one more in honor of those who have served.

Of COURSE we'll take the upgrade to the 35ft Yacht

This is what you think of when you say "I'd rather be boating"

Last weekend we were excited to spend the day out in a boat that one of our friends found through one of those deal sites. This was originally supposed to be a 22 ft boat, however we showed up a bit early and Chris went in to talk to the woman behind to counter to figure out the details. He walked out a few minutes later with the biggest grin on his face after he'd convinced the lady to upgrade us to the 35ft yacht for the same price because of all of "our" boating experience. 



Chris at the wheel

After we were given a tour of the 2 bathrooms, 3 bedroom, multi level boat, they asked if anyone had any boating experience to which I figured saying that I had "a lot" to would mean they let us take the boat.  Everyone else was conspicuosly quiet at this point, but they believe us and he gave us a push off the dock and we headed out into beautiful Pittwater.

View Larger Map

Lion Head 

This is a bay which has the ocean on the right hand side and also connects to our old boating area of the Hawesbury river.  

John taking a turn at piloting

We putted along at the measly 10 knots that the boat was goverend to out of the bay and into the river and then pulled up into Refuge Bay for some relaxation and to try our fishing rods.



Linton getting ready for the mooring catch, Hannah on hand with directions

John piloting us in to a mooring, Amy and Simone averting their eyes so he doesn't get nervous

 Unfortunately the size of the boat was a bit of a hinderance to the fishing, however the newcomers to the sport were quite thrilled with their first catches. 


Hannah's first fish



You touch it!



Hold it closer to the camera so that it looks bigger...

After feeding the tiny fish around we made our way back to the dock, which was the part of the day that I'd been dreading all day.  Why oh why don't they just put this thing at a mooring?!  Apparently I was the only nervous one, and the docking mission actually went off perfectly against all of my expectations.


Back at the dock, safe and sound

Although no monster fish were caught, any day boating is a great day, and when you can do it in a 35 ft yacht it's even sweeter.


100 Dives!

Two weekends ago we jumped on an invite from Jeroen and Raymonda to go for a dive at the bower which is right near home for us.  Although Chris had hit 100 dives on our last trip, I was a few behind and I was excited to do my 100th dive at our local beach.

100!

Conveniently they live in an apartment about 100 meters from the entry point so we suited up in their living room and walked down to the water in our gear.  

View Larger Map

 

Although we see people snorkeling and diving around here all the time we hadn't tried it ourselves and were very pleasantly surprised to find out that the diving was really good.  Also, with a maximum depth of about 6.5 meters it meant that we got cold before our air could run out so we had a nice long dive with a lot of great fish and sharks spotted.



Scorpion fish trying not to be seen



Cool shrimp in the foreground - tiny little box fish hanging out in the background

The little fish are using me for protection from the larger fish directly below me

Jeroen was feeding that large fish

We thought that lion fish were only in Thailand - who knew they were in our backyard!



see the video for some footage of this ray swimming around



Wobbiegong shark



Chris doing some fancy footwork to get out of the way of the shark



Don't put your hand down!

Hiding in the weeds

Master photographer Chris capturing the perfect picture of the wobbie

Sergeant Baker fish - I ate your relative for dinner a few months ago...

Lots of little fish

The dive crew post dive - that sun felt good!

We finished out the afternoon with a bbq at their place - overall an awesome way to do my 100th dive.  

One rainy weekend

Birdie beach - where are all of the nudists?

Last weekend we rounded everyone up for a camping trip before we moved too far into autumn (without all of the leaves dropping they don't call it fall here) when the weather and water won't be so nice.  Since we didn't have a long weekend, we found a place only about 1.5 hours north of Sydney to put up our tents.

View Larger Map

One of the amazing things about being in Sydney is that there are always a few different beaches to explore when you go camping, which was particularly reassuring in the case because part of Birdie beach is classified as "unclad".
Despite all of our concerns around who might be hanging out on the nudie part of the beach, the windy, cool and rainy weather ensured that everyone wanted to keep their clothes on. 

James helping by holding one chair down while everyone else sets up the shelter

In an effort to avoid a rain filled weekend we purchased a shelter on the way up, however luck was not with us and Saturday was raining off and on throughout the day.  Although we took some treks down to the beach and a few adventurous souls went into the water, most of the day was spent trying to find other ways to occupy ourselves.

Fueled by a few Guiness in honor of St. Patricks day, Kat and Webs pulled out the game of butthead.  For the unitinitated - this involves wearing a particularly silly looking cap while people throw balls at your head and try to get them to stick.

We set people up opposite each other and let them fly while laughing at how silly everyone looked.

Jeroen and Raymonda also decided that some driving exploration would be a good diversion.  Lucky for Jeroen, Ray was able to push him out of this ditch!

Hero!

On the way home we scouted out another deserted beach for a future camping trip, hopefully with blue skies and sunshine the next time.

Frazer Beach

As is always the case, the sunshine came out in full on the trip home, but still a good weekend away.