Don’t panic Captain Mainwaring …

As much as I enjoy patrolling our beach here in Barefoot Bay, it can be a very dull job. Our patrol last week was one such occasion. At this time of the year we’re on patrol from 9am to 5pm – and since the quad bike rusted to pieces, there’s not much to liven up the day with. So you basically sit in the radio room making the occasional call to VMR or the AirPac shark patrol plane – or you sit on the beach and keep the tourists out of the rip.

Liz had decided to take Jack up to Robertson to see my big sister and so tedious was the patrol that I decided to quickly nip home, shower and drive up the hill to have an evening meal with them too. The roads are busy round here at this time of year but I was pulling onto their drive at 6pm. I was enjoying a beer and watching a bit of the cricket with the BIL when my mobile phone rang. It was Robyn from the surf club asking if I was in town, because there had been an emergency call-out.

To say I was gutted was the under-statement of the year. Here was a chance to actually do something, and I was an hour away and out of the loop. It transpired that the emergency was a search and rescue for a missing child who’d taken a tinnie out and was lost somewhere out at sea. The Westpac chopper was in the air, other clubs were on their way and it was all hands to the pump. I was so very depressed that I couldn’t be there.

By 8 o’clock I couldn’t stand it any longer and I called the surf club to find out what was happening. Turned out several of the club members on the emergency callout list had been on the sauce and couldn’t come out, but the usual suspects had been available and had high-tailed it down to the club. They’d prepped the IRB and driven it down to the beach and had just launched it, when word came back that the emergency services had made a mistake and the kid in the tinnie was actually in Lennox Bay, some 800km north of us. Quite how they managed to confuse the two was beyond me, but despite the fact that it turned out to be a false alarm – I still wished I’d been down there for it.

City lights …
So we drove up to Sydney this morning having dropped the pooch off with my parents. After our last stay here (when we drove up to pick up Liz’s sister and stayed in a really grotty hotel) we were apprehensive about the quality of our accommodation. However we’ve struck gold –the hotel apartment room we have, on the 34th floor of the Meriton tower, is superb. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a lovely lounge/kitchen area and amazing views on all sides.

We checked in earlier, abandoned the car on the 10th underground level of the car park (how fucking big was the hole they dug when there building this place) and headed off to the aquarium on account of the fact that Jack wanted to see the new Dugongs. We’d booked our tickets online earlier on and so managed to avoid the long snaking queue at the tills. However it was still pretty busy inside, particularly for the cuter inmates like the platypus. Liz said that when she’d come up before they’d had to queue 45 minutes jjust to get their tickets.

So we checked out the dugongs and, whilst I’m sure they’re lovely creatures I have a question. How desperate would you have to be, to mistake these massive rolls of blubber for a mermaid? The highlight of the show was when a dugong coasted serenely dirrectly over my head – and had a shit.