Saling Pandion - Perfect conditions on the Wide Bay Bar

Wide Bay Bar at the southern end of Fraser Island, is renowned for flipping boats, and there are many disaster videos on youtube.  Here is us having a perfectly calm and sensible run. 

Video Back Log ... Sudbury Reef

Okay, it's a while ago now, but better late than never.

Reminy and Budi collaborated on this one.

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