Julian's Visit

The last few days has been very busy with visit from dearest bro Julian.

He showed me his pix of Charley, the beautiful sports boat he designed and built himself.

It gave me the idea to put it on Flickr, which grew into a bigger, better, idea of creating a sports boat group, mainly to showcase Australian Sports Boat competition racing. Australia has a slim showing on Flickr all round, so I thought I'd up the ante.

So I created a Flickr group for Sports Boats and put his best pix into it. Build it and they will come!

Julian and crew on Charley at Airlie Beach, 2006.

Next, on a trip up into Koala Mountain Sanctuary's upland regenerating old banana lands we had a wee car problem when the overgrown verge of the invisible track we were inching along gave way under right back wheel & it slid, tipped & came within a whisker of rolling down the steep slope. Not a scratch on it or us, but we had a long toddle back down mountain to get help as no mobile reception. Fortunately my good neighbor, Craig, Betty's son, came to rescue & towed it out easy peasy. Thanks Craig, you are such a good friend.

Craig attaching the tow chains to the Suzuki.

Following day was off to Brisbane early to visit our paternal aunty and uncle, both in their 80's. Had a feast of forbidden cholesterol fancy cakes with tea and looked at the family photos. Then I showed them this blog and my Flickr pages and gave them easy access links from their Favorites, so they can read all about their strange niece at their leisure.

Aunt and nephew reminiscing over the 60th Anniversary photos.

Hello Thea and Allen! Isn't the www just the most wonderful thing!

After that visit we made our way to Manly and the Royal Queensland Yacht Squadron where the last boats were coming in from the day's race in the St. Helena Cup regatta. Julian caught up with his sailing mates while I took a lot of pix for the Sports Boat Flickr group. It was blowing a 25 knot black nor-easter and the boats had had wild rides, so there were lots of torrid tales being exchanged in the debriefs.

The view from Darling Point across Brisbane River mouth in hard 25 knot wind.

I have never seen so many masts, so many expensive sleek craft, all in one small marina. Talk about clusters.

This is a cluster of......?.......(finish this sentence).

There were capsizes, including RIP It Up loading on ute trailer above, and one, Vivace, owned by Julian's mate Sorensen, was demasted.

Vivace loading onto trailer after demasting.

I posted the bulk of the pix to Flickr Sports Boats group, then put a notice in the Forum of the Anarchy page Julian contributes to, where sailing news is exchanged. I think they are already responding with lots of visitors to the pix, altho no new members to the group yet. But I'm hoping they'll see the merits of the exercise and join Flickr & get their pix up in the group soon.

So an eventful few days with Julian. He's off driving back south now and life gets back to "normal", for whatever that means.

HELLO THE ENEMY

Meanwhile I've seen the reason most of my native animals have disappeared this year. I had thought it was cane toads, but there are hardly any of them now. No, this was a CAT.

It actually came into house while I was sitting quietly reading one night. It killed a large antichinus in the kitchen and left it on the back doorstep, uneaten. But I saw it again when driving down track and realized how huge it is. Size of a Bobcat. E-NORM-OUS!

So it's goodbye possums, koalas, quoll, snakes, skinks, echidnas, bandicoots, just to name a few of the now not present species that used to be here in healthy numbers.

They say there is one wild ex-domestic cat to every square kilometre of Australia. I have found the enemy has now arrived here and done what cats do. Hunt and kill native wildlife. Tell that to all those people who simper over pretty pussies.