like time – only more so …
Archive for March, 2009
You might say that – I couldn't possibly comment …
Mar 29th
Found myself in and out of the surf club this week. I’m one of the few members of the surf club that actually lives here in Barefoot Bay. For reasons best known to themselves, most of the members of the club choose to come to the Bay instead of other clubs that are closer to them. Our long-serving club secretary lives in the Sussex Inlet, 60km south of us – the club president lives in Broughton, 10km away. In fact of all the members on the club committee – I’m the only one that actually lives here.
The advantage of that is that I have a 90 second drive to get to the club on patrol days and can stay in bed a lot longer than most of ‘em. The disadvantage is that I’m usually the person called upon to open up the club for people wishing to gain access for whatever reason. So the Yoga club, the SLSA Branch Committee, various maintenance bods, instructors and miscellaneous club members give me a ring if they need to get in.
This week the showers got a bit of an overhaul, the man from Coastalwatch paid us a visit and the council dropped by. We have a camera on the roof of our club which is maintained by the Coastalwatch group and very useful it is too. Prior to coming to the beach, most of the surf club’s members check out conditions online first – as do the local surfers. Anyway – the camera had died on its arse and they sent a tech guy out to fix it. I ended up standing on the roof of the club holding the ladder for him.
Sunday is the traditional beach day for the surf club, but this being the tail-end of the season, it’s fairly quiet at the moment. Today was particularly quiet because all the nippers were at their presentation day at Jamberoo Water Park. So on the beach was just the patrol and those of us doing our IRB training, along with various beach-goers. The swell was the biggest yet – 4ft on average – 6ft now and then as the odd big set came through.
Training was, ermm, eventful. For the most part I did fine, driving out through the surf, however I did come a cropper during one beach run. I did a run to shore and then turned to come back out. We went over the first two waves fine, but the third looked like it was going to break on the boat, so I turned the boat away in order to come around again. Unfortunately the prop was in frothing white water and, as I cranked up the revs, it merely cavetated – boiling the water. The end result of this was that the boat was sideways to the wave as it broke and myself and my crewman/instructor – Peter – were ejected from the boat. As I was thrown from the boat I remember thinking to myself that it would be a bad idea for the motor to hit me on the head, so I dove downwards to the bottom and waited for the boat to pass overhead. When I popped up, the boat had been thankfully washed towards shore and we recovered it without incident. Strangely enough I was really glad to have rolled the boat because one of the club’s longest serving IRB drivers said that until you did, you had no real idea how far you could push it.
The fun continued during rollover drill. We stripped the motor off the second IRB and towed it out to sea with the other boat. Then, just beyond the second sandbar we practiced rolling the boat over and righting it. Like most things this is not as easy as it sounds – it’s particularly hard to get on top of the upturned boat because there’s nothing to grab a hold of. Once on top, it’s fairly easy to pull the boat over using the rope that’s designed for just that job, but I told everyone to bear in mind that we were doing it without a motor on the boat.
The rules and how to break them …
I thought this story was very interesting as it could easily happen here in Oz. Not that Australian surf lifesavers are famed for taking Newfoundland dogs out on beach rescues, but because it’s indicative of the red tape that’s strangling modern life. Australia is every bit as swamped in bureaucracy as the UK – more so in many cases. I was reminded of this last week when one of the club members took the nippers (and indeed the nippers mums and dads) out in the IRB off the beach. If surf lifesaving got wind of this we’d be seriously admonished, fined and taken to task, but look at the facts – there were about 45 surf lifesavers on the beach that morning, the surf was incredibly tame and the driver of the boat was very experienced. According to the letter of the law we shouldn’t have taken those kids or their parents out on the boat, but nobody was in any danger and they’ve now had an adventure they’ll remember for a long time and which will quite posssibly keep them interested in the surf lifesaving movement.
There’s been lots of talk about the ‘rules’ within the club lately. I certainly have no objection to breaking those rules when nobody’s going to get hurt – but sometimes I accept that you have to lay down the law. Until recently the club had a quad bike which was jokingly referred to as a ‘junior retention device’ by more senior club members. What used to happen was that the teenage club members on patrol would take the quad for long jaunts up and down the beach. I didn’t mind them going for a quick burn-up, but one pair took things to extreme during one of the patrols I attended. They rode the bike virtually the length of our seven mile long beach, then out onto public roads, over to the pie-shop (where they bought a pie and some fizzie pop), before driving back a good 90 minutes later. So anyway – the edict came down that no club member was to ride the quad bike, the club tractor or the recently purchased but not yet delivered ATV unless they were over 17 and had a full driving licence.
It’s interesting to note that the RNLI have, within the last decade, adopted pretty much every facet of beach surf lifesaving as pioneered by the Australians. The red and yellow flags and uniform, the rescue tubes, the use of the IRB (originally poo-poo’d by the Brits until they saw how valuable a tool it was over here), swimming between the flags (indeed the ‘swim between the flags’ motto itself), rescue boards, nippers, flag races, the carries, the procedures – they were *all* originated over here. Indeed many of the surf lifesavers on British beaches are aussies following the sun to Europe.
What I think the Brits do right that the Aussies don’t is that the rescuers are unified. In the UK the RNLI does the onshore and offshore rescues, but here in Oz you have Surf LifeSaving Australia who are in charge of all beach surf lifesaving and the Marine Rescue Association who fulfil the traditional off-shore boat rescue service. I’d love to see their service and ours united.
Anyway – my bed’s calling to me – later ‘taters.
Always take the weather …
Mar 23rd
So we’re in transition at the moment – autumn has officially arrived and in a few weeks the clock will go back, heralding in darker evenings. But to be honest, autumn over here could well be the best of all the seasons. When the mercury’s in the mid or high 30′s you tend to spend a lot of time thinking about which air conditioned room you’re going to seek sanctuary in next. Those super-high temperatures of the summer make it difficult to do anything outdoorsy during the middle of the day and while that’s as good an excuse as any to sip an ice-cool beer down at the local boozer, it does hamper days out a bit.
So the transitional seasons, spring and autumn are often the best. Spring’s great, beause of the forthcoming warmer temperatures it heralds, but in autumn you have the advantage of a lovely warm ocean. All summer the water’s been baked by the sun and it’ll carry that warmth right through the next few months. So where I live in South Coast, New South Wales, the average daytime temperature is 26 or 27 degrees, which as far as I’m concerned is damn near perfect and the sea is still about 22 or 23 degrees, which as far as I’m concerned is damn near perfect. At night the temperatures drop nicely which means that people like my missus can get a good nights sleep without constantly thrashing around in a pool of sweat. Personally speaking I’m one of those bods that can stick a solitary foot outside the sheet or duvet and cool off, but my missus is built for cooler latitudes and has problems sleeping during the hot summer months. So it’s a win-win situation. Ideal temperate temperatures, perfect water conditions.
Liz treated me to a slap-up Italian Sausage Roll and Ham Kettle Chips down at the river a couple of days ago. On such occasions, I’m always surprised at how nice the area we live in really is. I know most of us migrants think we live in the best part of Oz (well, apart from our cousins in Perth 
) but this really is a truly lovely bit of the planet. We have this huge wide lazy river, a long unspoilt beach fringed by national park, mountains, hills, tracks, paths, boat-ramps, harbours and largely uncongested roads. As we sat on the bench next to the river eating our lunch, the only other person for miles was a lone fisherman sat on the jetty.
Peep pressure …
There are always fads and crazes at schools. Things seem to spreadh by osmosis from one school to another. When I was Jack’s age it was things like Space Dust, Slime, space hoppers, Slinkies and Raleigh Choppers. I even remember one year when, somewhat bizarrely, jews harps (or jaw harps as we’re supposed to call them in this politically correct age) were all the rage.
Thus far there have been several crazes in Jack’s school. Handball and Pokemon stand out. The latest craze on planet Jack is Backugan. These are little monster models that you roll across special magnetic cards and they pop opent to reveal an alien inside. $35 gets you three Bakugan and six cards. There are 540 Bakugan in the range (so far) and you are encouraged to ‘collect them all’. When I pointed out to Jack that the cost of the entire range was $540 he blinked at me and remained enigmatically silent.
Jack has been going on about Backugan for weeks. In fact he confessed that most nights he dreamed about them. Liz found this so amusing that she made a Backugan temple for Jack who kindly posed in front of it when he came home from school.
CSI London
Love this very funny CSI spoof. Ermmm, probably not safe for work. Unless you own your own company, in which case get stuck in.
More boats …
Another Sunday, another four hours of training in the IRB down at the beach. Not so many misadventures for the assembled students this time though, mainly because nobody was taking any risks due to much more lively surf. The tide was low, which meant that the sandbank was exposed and thus launching the boat was a royal pain in the butt, because you had to drag it across 15metres of sand to get it close enough to the shorebreak to get some water under the prop. The waves were breaking all the way out, which meant you had to stay frosty at all times for fear of some rogue 2m wave dropping on your head. Nobody fell out of the boats this time, which is a minor miracle, but we did manage to break two of the motors, which was kind of inevitable.
They’re talking about putting me and fellow driving-trainee Matt through our tests in about three weeks time, which should prove interesting. The only part of the test that concerns me is the solo drive. Those ribs behave far far differently when you don’t have any crew to trim the front of the boat. It’s incredibly easy to roll it or flip it over backwards and so you have to move from the traditional driving position on the rear of the port pontoon, to sitting inside the boat on the floor to keep it slightly more balanced. All I can hope is that the conditions are forgiving on the day! There again I wished for that when I took my bronze and instead I got a 2m shorebreak.
And finally …
The local TV listings magazine that I had been writing for has, unfortunately, closed. This is a real shame as it was a superb promotional tool for my PC business, to the extent that I stopped flyering entirely. Oh well, best invest in a new pair of Crocs.
Load of old shit …
Mar 17th
I downloaded a couple of shows recently that jogged the old memory banks. They were both about the south west of England and Cornwall in particular. In one, Richard Wilson takes a road trip down the A30 coast road and in the other historian David Heathcote explores Cornwall with one of the old Shell Guides. I thought David Heathcote’s was the more entertaining of the two, particularly as he covered parts of Cornwall we know very well. He was particularly scathing of Padstow (or Padstein as it’s more commonly known) and the fact that you stand more chance of winning the lottery than finding a car park space there. Was nice seeing the Camel Estuary and Rock, because we went on a sailing course there once – learning to drive those little Mirror dinghies you always see.
One moment did tickle me though. Heathcote drove down to Polzeath beach, a place he hadn’t visited in more than 20 years, to see if it had changed. The general upshot was that it hadn’t really changed much in that time, but what made me giggle was all the surfers, in full steamer wetsuits, hats and gloves, wandering down to the water with their surfboards. I love Cornwall, but that side of surfing in the UK truly sucks. I suddenly remembered those winter surfs off Fistral or Crantock when your head gets ice-cream freeze and pissing in your wetsuit to warm up is a necessity. Don’t get me wrong, it cools off here too, but never *that* cold.
After my wander down memory lane I was galvanised to go and read an online Cornish newspaper to see what was concerning people down there. The first story that caught my eye was very interesting to me – it was about a graffiti protest by locals against second homes. The story mentions a case in which a jetty which would have helped local fisherman, was denied planning permission after high court action from second home-owners. It also mentions the village of Worth Matravers where a staggering 60% of the homes are holiday houses – the place is now referred to as a Ghost Village.
The reason all this interests me is that prior to the Australian ‘thing’ we’d planned to go and live in Cornwall. Not as second home owners, but actual residents. However thanks to the demand for second homes and the (then) booming housing market, the best we could have afforded was a pokey ex council house on the outskirts of Truro, which wasn’t exactly our idea of living the Cornish dream. I genuinely believe that the second home issue is a scandal that needs legislating against. I also strongly believe that affordable social housing should be made available to young locals who will stay and raise a family in the area.
The other story that piqued my interest was this one, about the phenomenon of people discarding dog shit in plastic bags. I’ve mentioned this before in my blog because we used to see it all the time on the popular dog walks where we used to live in the Cotswolds. I just have no idea what people are thinking. I mean, if you don’t want to pick up your dog’s shit, then just leave it there and someone will tread in it and distribute it down the track or nature will take care of it. If you do want to pick it up, then deposit your bag of shit in a dog bin. But don’t pick up the shit and then tie the bag to a fence or hang it from a bush. I mean, am I missing something here? Are the bags actually a signal to others that there’s some dogging to be had nearby? What on earth are they thinking? They do the right thing by picking up their dog’s shite – and then they litter the countryside they presumably love with neatly tied baggies of shit. Just utterly bizarre. Dog shit and, indeed dog shit in plastic bags hanging from fences, is not something I have to contend with any longer here. I honestly can’t remember the last time I saw some shite on the pavement.
Remember this?
I was reminded of that when I read this story. I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.
