Monday, January 17, 2011

Shh, dont tell anyone!

My nemesis for this weekend... (no killing the wildlife!)

My grand daughter Amie with just one of the many small crabs the kids caught and released. Hows this for lovely clear water?

This was our beach for the weekend with the stairs in fore ground.

Then I turned around and took a pic facing the other way, you can see the sand hills where we sand surfed, at the base of the sand hills is the seal colony and the rocky headland where the lads got their arms stretched.

Sand boarding anyone? This is the beginner slopes with hills twice this size further around

The lads on the headland known as Snapper Rocks

One of the Australian Sea Lions..not dead, just lazy!





What with half the eastern states of Australia under water I felt kinda bad about swaning off for a weekend away…for about half an hour.
There's this almost untouched area only 70 miles away you see… people drive past it every day without knowing that just down that dirt road is paradise by the sea. (Shh! Don’t tell)
Untouched beaches only broken here and there by the rocky headlands that provide great fishing and designate where my beach ends and yours begins. Just back from the cliff edge the camp sites hide under low trees for protection against summer sun.
Normally it would be too late in the season already and this area would be baking in unbelievable heat, but this year is different. Temps in the low 80’s (low 30’s C) and above average rain this year has left this area green and inviting even now.
So it was we set off with 4 kids, my daughter and her other half and another friend, two cars, a trailer, a mountain of camping gear and an assortment of alcohol. (medicinal purposes only of course)
Our chosen beach was at the bottom of a stair built down the low cliffs many years ago by someone called Mills, (so the sign says) our camp perhaps 150 yards from the cliff for child safety sake and everything within a mile or so of everywhere we wanted to see… I wont bore you with the details but our weekend consisted of much swimming in the warm water of our beach, fishing on the prominent headland a mile away, watching the sea lions on the beach where you can walk right up to them (if you have a fish for them) sand surfing on the huge dunes, hunting for and placing a few Geocaches… I think that about covers the main things.
I also had some rather wonderful 12 year old scotch left from a Christmas present (cant have it going off before it’s/I’m drunk can we?) and Pearls rather good first book in what I hope will be a series…(http://pearl-whyyoulittle.blogspot.com/) I read, I drank, I laughed, I staggered to the beach with fishing rod in hand, I spent a lot of time with the grand kids…wonderful!

There's almost nothing bad about this spot…almost! There are rather a lot of sharks here abouts, not that we actually saw any this time, and there are a lot of creepy crawlies. Last time we found a beautiful jet black 3inch Scorpion wondering about the camp and this time I found a really big Wolf Spider. They grow about twice the size of this one… but this one found the box for my camp stove and would not give it up for some reason. I though, ‘Ok, you can have it then’ and put the box and spider 20 feet away from my camp. It marched about on the box guarding it from me for 15 minutes then decided it wanted my camp too. It abandoned the box and marched directly back into camp…I was just thinking it might be a nice night to give up the camp and sleep out under the stars… But no, I’m the bigger of us so I got into bed and ignored the spider rampaging about the camp until it eventually gave up showing off and went home (where ever that was)
We’re going back in a couple of weeks…my son-in-law now knows about this hidden wonderland and cant wait to get back there. He caught some fish, but not the huge monsters that smashed up his gear and bent his best rod double…probably Snapper or Sharks, I’ll let you know!


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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
What a beautiful spot to spend the weekend. The water looks fantastic, so clear and clean.

Pearl said...

Wow. What a beautiful area...

And Wolf Spiders? Yikes!!

Pearl

Windsmoke. said...

Poor Wolf Spider might have been lonely and looking for some company. They don't eat much or take up to much space. Fantastic photos.

Jen said...

It's just not right that you didn't even know about geocaching until I told you and now you're kicking my behind. I need to hide one of my own...or at least log some of the ones I've found...

Tempo said...

Hi Magsx2, The water was calm, clear and very clean all weekend, you can see in the pics how calm the water was, Back when I was young and unafraid of sharks we used to skin dive for crayfish here too. (lobster)
Hey Pearl, You have to just about stand on one of these giant spiders to get bitten, they have no use for us...having been bitten it's only a bit worse than a bee sting.
Windsmoke, I suspect I built my camp on his camp...or my food was attracting some critters he wanted to eat, you can see he was a bit skinny for one of these.
Hey Jen, Ive done every cache in my town and lots in the area...I'm having to travel now so that will slow me down somewhat. All three of my girls and their fams now cache plus my in-laws and several friends...so much for me keeping it quiet. I had noticed your figures hadn't been going up for some time, even after your recent caching trip.

Spiral said...

I love your respect for critters. In my recent camps I kept finding all kinds of spiders hiding under the fly on my tent - ready to catch mosquitos. I saw a couple of scorpions too - thankfully not too close to my camp.

The Sea Lions sound awesome!

Tempo said...

Hi Spiral, I really don't like killing anything unless it's necessary. My father in-law is a butcher so Ive helped slaughter animals and don't find that more than a little hard.. but for creatures not considered food..that's quite different. If I had to, I guess I'd have locked poor Mr Spider up for the night in an ice cream dish or something, but he was out catching bugs that were attracted to my camp so he was actually doing me a favor.