Goin' back to Kali

If you've never been to Kalbarri, this is what it's all about.

Walk this way

By crikey, it was hot yesterday.

So I took K and D's Subaru for a spin down to South Beach and locked poor recuperating Pounce! up in the sweatbox which was our home.

Comeuppance was swift as my feet hit the shimmering sand. At times like these - you know, like when somebody treads on a patch of Double Gs - I advise them to do like Steve Tyler and 'walk this way'. By this I mean walk normally and embrace pain as your friend.

But yesterday my tootsies felt like they'd been dipped into a vat of freshly blown glass. So back on flew my shoes.

Oh what relief when my torso hit the clear water. As I duck-dived to the bottom, a tepid top layer gave way to the most refreshing cool. Drifting up for air, I noticed I'd been engulfed by a large school of mullet.

Glimmering silver in the midday sun, they drifted by, unperturbed by my gallumphing intrusion into their wet, wild world. And that's where mullet should stay.

Not because they're living, glimmering things. But because they taste terrible.

(photo courtesy Hazelblackberry Inc.)

If there's a Bussel in your hedgerow

Haze and I drove down south this morning to catch the Busselton jetty ocean swim.

Over 1,300 competitors swam 3.6 kilometres around the longest timber jetty in the southern hemisphere.

(Somehow I think the first two stats here are more impressive than the one about the jetty.)

But something that was very impressive was the Irish woman who finished last. She came in a full 15 minutes after the next slowest swimmer. But hey, she traversed 3.6 kilometres of ocean under her own steam.

It was enough to make me want to dust off my budgie smugglers.

Silo man

Yesterday, after I'd come home from bird-watching, Hazel and I joined her parents - Bezley and Bloody Ern - for a coffee down at Rockingham, where this snap of Australia's largest wheat silo was taken.

Rockingham's called Little Britain because at the last national census a third of its population was born in Britain.

After coffee, Haze and I went for a dip in the briney, because the day was warm.

Didn't stay in for long though, 'cause the water temperature was only fit for a third of the locals.

Sir Lancelin

I drove up north yesterday to check out the annual Ledge Point to Lancelin sailboarding marathon.

Before the race, I got chatting to a Dutch competitor, Peter, who as it turned out wound up winning the 20 nautical kilometre race.

He was a top bloke, a lot like that European exchange student who arrives at your high school with no English in March, and by May is tapping the keg and bowling googlies at parties.

After the frenzied race start, landlubbers like myself hopped into our jalopies and joined the 15 kilometre convoy up to Lancelin to catch the finish.

As Peter emerged on the Lancelin horizon, a full 10 minutes ahead of the next sailor, his board triumphantly skipped into the air. As the board cruised a little closer, the MC announced the rider was indeed Peter, and that this was a good thing, because "he's a 'goer' who'll definitely put his $3,000 prize money on the bar, folks".

After the race, and still dripping salt water, Peter was asked if this would indeed be the case. To which he replied, "There's prize money? Yeah. If there's money, why not?!"

That crazy Dutch exchange student.