Hello Peter, I shall be visiting Woy Woy in a week's time not what I was expecting when I booked my flight. Andrew tells me that he has occasional smoke 1 day in 5 and I have been monitoring the progress of the fires on a daily basis via the web site.
http://google.org/crisismap/australia Anyone wanting to pin point my destination look along coast above Sydney midway to Newcstle. Look for Umina Beech in detail and there is a fine white line across the blue water and this is the Rip Bridge and I am in sight of this to my left when looking across the water (Booker Bay). OO-my-nah beech is a beautiful curved sandy beech which is almost deserted weekdays, just walking in the surf is almost perfect. Other beeches are more popular but this is the one for me, it is a 25 minute cycle ride from where I am staying in Booker Bay Road.
I wish all you guys in Australia an end to the fires in this New decade and hope nature manages to revitalise the damage and that forest management will take all this into account so that there is no repeat of this catasthophe in the future.
I am little surprised there is not a more global response to the fires, but perhaps I have that wrong. With just 25 million population the cost and repair is an enormous burden on Australian citizens. I understand water is now getting in short supply, I was always careful in that regard and after a shower you barely have to dry yourself the air is so dry.
Swimming is just a short walk out across the small garden and into the water, there is a lot of wildlife with several small fleets of Mallard ducks, Pelicans and a kookaburra, mynor birds parakeets and last year a pair of nesting sea eagles with wedge tailed kites on the wing. The tide comes in from the right so the advice for swimming is to wait until slack tide and swim out against the tide, makes for a safer swim return. The fisherman and their small boats are in mid stream drifting back and forth with the tide, and I can recommend Flathead and chips as served a couple of miles down the road.
The leisure craft and sail boats go past on the tide, a carefully timed trip for the larger yachts to negotiate the complex channel and get over the sand bar which takes over half an hour to get out to the sea proper. A few hours south down the coast is the Hawkesbury River with a wide estuary and free mooring points in the middle of a National Forest which I hope is still there. To wake up in the morning here in total silence with the smell of eggs and bacon cooking is a total pleasure.
There is a railway station there and so my d-i-law can spend the weekend on the yacht and go straight off to work in Gosford on the Monday morning. For her it is such a different life cycle she was once in a small flat with an hour commute to work in a busy city probably getting home late and having all to do before it started again the next day, here she has a 4 day (10 hours) week with a long weekend.
My son has been there 11 years now and is reluctant to move away, and as he works at home, and spare time is taken up maintaining the house and chores, and now with of course a quite extensive model railway in the back of the garage, this is now a 'Local Area Network' so can be run from his phone.
Their yacht is moored a few 100 yards away and that needs regular attention as well. On another thread on charging multiple batteries someone kindly put up a web site on methods and I copied this across and now Andrew has re-wired the charging system on his boat to be a more effective one.
A 5 week holiday there for me goes all too quickly, Exercise is in the morning (cycle to the beech and walk in the sand) which works out well as my son is usually working then. I felt that I must not expect to be waited on, so I muck in with cooking and do a few meals myself and we go out shopping as I know the area quite well now. I still have to be shown how the automatic coffee machine works and the 3D TV which is wired into work off a smart phone if necessay but usually off an iPad. But there again I have some books with me anyway.
So I shall be packing over the weekend and starting my journey Tuesday evening of nearly 23 hours with a 90 minute stop over in Singapore. With the adverse winds on the return journey it takes an hour longer to get back.
Kind regards
Roy[
