Blue

RJ with some young eco-warriors and their trash whale

The award-winning documentary about Earth's oceans, Blue, screened at our local cinema last Friday night, and one nervous 14 year old introduced it.  She wrote the speech herself and it's kind of a nice summary of our trip.

The audio is LOUSY but I can hear it on my computer if I put headphones on.

Mushies and Bushies!

It's officially autumn and we're all pretty excited about the weird and wonderful fungi popping up all over the place - so we went on a Mushie Hunt for bush school.

Warning: unless you get really excited about fungi, this video will probably be very boring.

But Mrs Stevenson (my senior Biology teacher), this one's for you :)

Life on Passage - a film about what we do all day when sailing from here to there...enjoy....

Money money money

We're up to our necks in coffer-filling activities at the moment to fund the next stage of our adventure: New Caledonia and Vanuatu.  We're staying at my parents house on the water (thanks!) with a clear view of the boat through the trees.  The kids are in school for a term (😡), and we're heads down bums up getting international registration for the boat, tinkering with upgrades (New cooling system for the fridge! New tender cover! Mast-steps! Bilge cleaning! Demilitarising the front cabin!), and scraping together all the cash we can.

We leave for Noumea in May, cyclones permitting, but stay tuned for more posts.

Bushies

Budi at bushschool

One of the nicest things about being briefly at home again (other than white goods) is being able to go to bush school again.  My friends and I have been running a little non-commercial bushschool for just over two years now, taking the kids out of school every Tuesday in term time.

I park the car at the beach, the kids spill out and run down to our ‘classroom’ a shady spot under a pandanus tree.  Sylvie and Budi usually go straight up the nearest she-oak but sometimes they’ll come for a wander down the beach with me to look for evidence of Foxy.

Sand is the perfect medium to learn animal tracking on, not just because the prints are so easy to see, but because the timing of the animal’s passage over the beach is easy to work out: if you know that high tide was three hours ago, and there’s fox tracks below the tide line, you know the fox was there in the last three hours.  I’ve only ever seen the fox in the flesh once (he/she was running away) but there are fresh tracks every morning.

Once everyone has arrived and we’ve all said hello, we form a big circle on the sand and do yoga.  This ain’t no ordinary yoga. Each person takes it in turns to go into the middle and demonstrate their pose, which they have made up after choosing a local animal or plant to mimic.  Sea star poses are popular but messy.  White faced heron poses are hard.

A flock of white faced herons

After yoga we do gratitude, with everyone offering up something they feel grateful for that day.  

Ocky is grateful to be at bushschool today

 

A game of Bats and Moths is next, to teach about echolocation and to encourage listening skills.

One moth about to be eaten by one bat, and one tree

We usually do a sitspot at some point, where the kids wander off and find somewhere to sit in silence by themselves for 10-20 minutes.  The shared morning tea is a highlight.

Today we focused on 'ageing' tracks.  The kids set up a tracking box each and fenced it off.  If the tracks are left undisturbed, we’ll be able to see what a week old track looks like next Tuesday.

Making a tracking box

Budi's footprint, fresh

Bushies en masse

Bewitched

Marinas are uncanny places, a bit like the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel, where you start out gasping at all the different lollies (hot showers! 240 V power! washing machines!) but then realise there’s a big scary witch hiding inside who wants to roast you in her oven and eat you for dinner.

Okay, maybe they’re not that bad, but after a few days in a marina, something witchy starts to happen to us: we want to leave, we know we should leave, we’re haemorrhaging cash out our eyeballs, but we keep saying things to each other like, “maybe if we stayed for one more night we could finally get round to fixing the [insert boat part]” and fronting up to marina office with our tails between our legs and asking to pay for “just one more night.” Life in a marina is dull, it’s usually hot, it’s often noisy, but it’s easy.

Eventually the kids start to go Big Time Berko and the scales fall from our eyes (Who needs hot water? Who needs shore power? Who needs clean undies?) and we get the hell out of there.

We’re always glad we did.

Us escaping from another marina

Where we ended up

Shrimp

Shrimp is Sylvie's latest insult ("ah, ya shrimp"), but when she applied it to the "island" at Sudbury Reef, we think she was using it as a term of endearment. We hung off a Parks mooring (go Parks!) on this tiny cay off the coast of Cairns for a couple of magical days.

She's right - there ain't much to it.

Although the kids have planted out and fertilised a Coconut Grove.

And the added joy of Trout. This is Malachy's first independent trout.

Nude Fishing on Pandion, by Malachy

(You'll notice there's a recurring theme since we reached the tropics, and it ain't fishing - Liss)

Today we started from Butterfly Bay, Whitsundays, and began our longest passage yet. It was really rocky! We took turns doing watch. Mum was helming, we were lounging round in the cockpit and dad was sleeping (nude) and we had all our sails out. It was almost dark.  That’s when the fish decided to bite.  “NNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!” went the reel.  “Fiiiiiiiiiiiissssh!” went Mum, and “Aarrgggghh!” went Dad (nude). Dad raced up the steps (nude) and grabbed the rod (nude). We started furling the sails.  Dad, reeling in the fish (nude) yelled, “It’s a tuna!” Dad for some reason brought the fish into the cockpit; it flopped around and hit the floor. “Eeeeeeekk!” went everybody, leaping out of the way.

Tuna = sea chicken.

Yum.

Hot tip for Dad: sleep in boardies.