We're in lovely Noosa Heads since Wednesday. Imagine Marin where one can get a penthouse (w vu) for $60 per night, a sea temperature of about 74 degrees, and a couple of miles of white sand beach and you'll get pretty close. Health food readily available: wheat grass juice and ginko biloba shakes. Organic everything. Oh yes, and, two miles of beautiful right point breaks.
We'll stay here at least until Friday the 19th if not for the rest of our lives.
Stripping the defective paint was almost complete. Just the insides of the hulls to go. Job went very slowly because vigorous stripping techniques would have removed too much of the fairing compound and lead to an even longer re-fairing job.
A carbon fibre rudder stock (the round pole that connects the rudder to the boat).
Very strong. Very expensive.
The stairs down into the starboard hull. Rosewood and beech. Floors are probably
finished this week.
Looking forward up the starboard side.
Looking into the starboard engine room down the aft hatch. Lots of space to work
on the engine.
Fuel filters are actually in the wet locker at the front of the cockpit. Easy
to check, easy to service.
Land of many right points.
For some reason, I'd acquired the belief that there was a replica of James Cook's Endeavour docked in Mooloolaba. That and the name "Mooloolaba" were more than enough to convince me to drag everyone down the coast to see what sort of town would grace such a name. Sadly the Endeavour was nowhere to be found. We did, however, find some good tide pools, containing the two specimens pictured above. The hermit crab was the largest I've ever seen, easily 3 inches long. And the sea cucumbers were, well, wierd and slimy.
Spent hours looking for the dreaded stonefish to no avail.
Today, Saturday, dawned rainy so an immediate visit to the dreaded homework gulag was
called for. Here we see the inmates slaving away at their grisly task.
Rainbow lorikeet
Fortunately, the weather cleared up and we decided on a hike in Noosa National Park. The park covers most of Noosa Point proper and is just a short hike from our penthouse (w vu).
We saw an actual wild koala. It even moved. When we first saw it all we could see was its butt. When we came back it was on the same branch but its head was showing. Here's the headshot:
They're pretty hard to see. I think that some of the natives make a sport of looking up into gum trees when a gullible looking crowd of tourists comes by. Within minutes you get a huge crowd of gawkers trying to figure out what they're looking at: "koala", "eagle", "bearded lorikeet", etc.
What we look like after spending 5 minutes explaining to Nicoline how to take
a still picture with the video camera.
I went by myself. Only an hour and a half until dark anyway. Paddled out past a fancy wedding at Little cove (the second notch in the coast heading out towards Noosa point, the first is called "first point" and we had surfed there yesterday). Surf was mega small so I paddled further down the coast to something called "the boiling pot". It had a rocky shore, but unlike the first two spots it also had actual waves.
As the sun sank toward the horizon, my mind turned toward the rocky exit. Predictable dangers of rock and wave. The necessity of good timing. The hoped for absence of stone fish. Hard to speculate about their population because it is hard to know how many one has missed. Always the danger of the blue striped octopus. Small, circumspect. Intelligence roughly comparable to a house cat. Octopi are nocturnal and it was getting more nocturnal with each passing moment. Perhaps they become more truculent at night when they emerge to seek their prey. Presence of other surfers as a "beaten path" factor. Notorious stupidity of surfers wrt. crowd behavior.
The arrival of the next set put an end to these ruminations. The telltale hump of the second wave just barely visible over the top of the first leaves me plenty of time to get the position just right. The odd silent Japanese guy sitting inside snaps around for the first wave flails wildly and misses it. But he does have a way-cool graphic job on his 6' 2". That leaves me in the priority position. New "Jackson Turner" 9' 6" pintail paddles like a dream. I angled it a little to avoid collecting the Japanese guy as a hood ornament, smiled at the other fellow I'd been swapping waves with and glided into an 18-inch wave. It walled up perfectly in front of me and the clear water made it look like I was flying over the rocks. Kicked out 30 yards (uh, metres) latre, waited for the lull and then put one foot oh-so-gingerly down on the rocks. No explosion of shattering pain. Only the usual vague slimeyness. Most dangerous animal I've seen on this trip is some undercooked trout.
Got back to find the kids still in the pool playing cannible barnacle, which I was obliged to join.