Working boats of Woy Woy

(Woy Woy and nearby anyways. The title looked way better without the nearby bit.)

Did not go walkies this week. Too much slaving over a hot keyboard and not enough exercise. I'll get fat. Anyways, here's some boats to look at. How'd yer be spending yer working week out on the water on one of these?



Hard to tell with a boat this size if it's a commercial fishing boat or just belongs to a very keen amateur. Moored at Eulalia Wharf Davistown in 2007.




This one is definitely a commercial fishing boat. Belinda K moored off Brick Wharf Road Woy Woy in 2007.




Oyster farm boat moored at Empire Bay in 2006.




Jetty building pontoons moored just off Woy Woy Wharf, along side Brisbane Water Drive. 2006.




MV Gladstone at Gosford Wharf in 2006. She appears to be a picker-up of flotsam and jetsam from Brisbane Water's traffic lanes.


Could not post yesterday. Bloody ISP had some sort of fit. Either that or the whole internets was down. Then I forgot it was Saturday. My brain is going soft. Thank fuck nothing else is. Fucking hours it's taken me to do this post today. Sunday brain. See yer next week.

All the leaves are green and the sky is grey

I have been working my arse off this last couple of months. Have not even walked for a whole month. Hideous state of affairs. Must remedy. Holidays coming up and I'm trying to wangle a whole month off in which to have rest and walkies and rest and stuff and rest. Meanwhile, Woy Woy is blooming with summer flowers.



Jacaranda and Hakea

Jacarandas are an exotic species (imported and not native to Australia). Gorgeous trees. Currently looking fabulous against the Woy Woy skies. An aerial photo of a town when these are flowering will instantly tell you where the older areas of the town are.

Hakea (or possibly grevillea) is a native species and a popular garden bush. Couple more looking spiffy on a black background here.




Christmas bush

Ceratopetalum gummiferum. Native species. Coming into full flower now, hence the name Christams bush.

Close-ups




Lillipilli hedge. A native species, Syzygium smithii. Not flowering but leafing. The leaves on top go red in spring and summer.

The flowering gums (native species) have finished flowering and those noisy lorikeet bastards have buggered off to greener pastures. The giant cacti are budding (exotic species).

Woy Woyan flowers both native & exotic

All the native flowers posted since I started tagging plus Winter floraland for added seasonal confusion.


Local linkage

The duck problem (Ta for the link, Ian.)

Excellent mappage and link to war stories from Steve. Had no idea the war came so close to the NSW coast.

Kite-surfer airlifted from Ettalong Beach. Looks like he came ashore at the end of Barrenjoey Road near those 60s flats. Poor bastard. Sorry I missed the chopper landing at Ettalong but.

Girl priest raises Woy Woy's PCF (Playground Coolness Factor).

Buy one get one free ferry tickets on the Codock II AKA Cockatoo ferry from the 27th.

Give me the Southerly or give me death

Jetty building platform boats at Woy Woy Wharf a few weeks ago.

It is bloody hot and bloody sticky. Got to 34 and about 300% humidity. I am irritable and miserable. We were promised a nice cool Southerly and so far there's been fuck all.


Have you seen this dog?



These signs and others are still up all around Woy Woy.

Sanji has been missing since the 9th of November. She is part of the husky team that pulls Santa's sleigh to shopping centres and old people's homes.

Reward for her safe return. Phone 4341 2684/040 504 3306.

Full text of notice


Local Linkage

Tascott is now on facebook. It has photos and a cocky video. That's a video of a cockatoo not a video with an excess of self-confidence.

Right. I'm off. It is my intention to climb into a bath of icy cold beer armed only with a straw.

Um, yeah

Missed another Tuesday blog. Work is piled high. Brain is numb.

Might be a couple of months before I can manage Tuesday posts again so let's go with just Saturdays for a bit.

P.S. Promise I'm not going to stop altogether. I still like doing it.


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Our Steve

Woy Woy Steve, commenter and local blogger, got himself in the local rag. Read all about it.

I read yer article, Stevo, over someone's shoulder in the train. Very good. Couldn't get my own copy but everyone was talking about it. Onya!


Snippets

A few links and stuff from the back of the cupboard.

Freo Boys High at the Lock Family's Ramblings (Yes, that is my photo)

Native flowers fact sheets with pictures

Marvellously lethal (a cautionary tale)

Fagans Bay

(Random Gosford walkies)



Fagans is a tiny bay hidden in plain sight, barely noticed by commuters as they rattle into Gosford on the train.




I like the lazy blue swirl of the speedboat's wash on the water.




Looking south from Gosford, down the western side of Brisbane Water.

From the foreground back into the photo:
Gosford foreshore
Point Clare, with TS Hawkesbury
Tascott (pretty much invisible behind the bulk of Point Clare)
Kooelwong, Murphys Bay
Woy Woy
Lion Island (spottable only by the eagle-eyed)
Saratoga (left edge of photo)


Low tide in Woy Woy Bay - very atmospheric

A Photo a Day - Col, Woy Woy blogger


UFO (or not)

So there I am this morning sitting half asleep on the bus to Gosford. The sky was blue, the warm morning sun came in through the window like a warm blanket. The bus pulled up at the lights next to the trots and the traffic jerked and flowed in and out of Racecourse Road.

Then I saw it. It was beautiful. A small spherical silver craft hanging perhaps 300 feet above Brisbane Water, right near TS Hawkesbury. It was lit by the sun and glowed white. It just hung there absolutely still in the air above the water.

I goggled at it for a moment or two and reached out the tap the person in front of me.

Then the lights went green and the bus moved off and the UFO flickered and moved off with us. It was just a reflection and nothing more, but for a few short moments I thought we had LGMs!

Magnificent beasts

(Davistown walkies)



Giant cactus flower. Golden knobs along a sort of flat thingy. This was taken a couple of weeks back so it might be open now. Locals zooming along Davistown Road can see it if they slow down at they come up to the roundabout at the school. Look for the giant cactus.




A magnificent beast, maybe 40 feet high. Easily dwarfs this one in Ettalong and this Woy Woy one with the big knobs.


Sucks to be me

This ghost-blogging job is giving me the shits. More work in it than expected. I'm not getting out for walkies so posting for a couple of weeks might be spotty. It's sorta fun though, as long as you don't have to come into contact with upper management. Those buggers can talk for hours and say nothing. No wonder they go into bloody politics.

Right. I'm off. Be good and I'll chuck something up on Tuesday night.

Grab bag

(My poor over-worked brain is in recovery mode. Here’s something it prepared earlier.)


Local linkage

Gosford Times

Ettalong Beach Reporter

A photo a day - Woy Woy local

The Lost Railway of South Woy Woy



Spiketionary

Added fillum to it.



Blog for free, or near as damn it

The last bits of the how-to posts. Probably.


For free

Blogger.com (blogspot)
Flickr basic account
Sitemeter.com (tells you who is reading your blog)
Technorati (publicise your blog)


Near as damn it

Flickr Pro at $30 a year (American dollars)


Gotta get you into my life

Schedule blogging into your week. Mark off Wednesday nights for pottering about on the internet and start putting a blog post together.


Yeah but no but

Gorn! Have a go. Whatcher got to lose?

Too chicken? Got nothing to say?

Read an amusing blogtionary instead.


How to take decent photos
How to blog (ideas, writing stuff, tips)
Put your old film photos on the internet
Put your digital photos on the internet
Put your photos on a blog


Okay, that's all my brain is capable of tonight. I am buggered.

Waterfowl & land birds of Brisbane Water

(Walkies gleanings)



Shag on a rock on a hot day. Just near the Veterans Hall ferry stop at Henderson Road Saratoga.

All these walkies I do make me notice stuff I never noticed before. Stuff like the flowers and trees and birds. I don't know a lot of the names of them but I like to see them living along side us humans, floating on the water between the ferries, wandering about on the foreshores, harassing tourists for chips, that sort of thing.




Waiting for fish heads at Correa Bay Reserve Woy Woy Bay Road Woy Woy South.




The bog standard breed of ducks, hoping for free food at Empire Bay. Someone got on the ferry with hot chips and the ducks soon clustered round. Buggered if I know why because if you chuck them a chip they won't eat it.




Pelican soliciting for chips at the fish and chip shop on Brick Wharf Road.

(In the background is an interesting 1950s block of units called "Caprice" in red brick with a pattern of dots on it formed with white bricks. The block was demolished last year, possibly earlier.)




Still can't believe how close I got to this kookaburra. They're normally very timid. This one seemed to be waiting for the local office workers to deliver its lunch.

Kookaburras are seen at all times of day up on the hills and ridges, but here on the flat of Woy woy they come in groups at dusk and laugh in gum trees.




Brush turkeys. They look like such ungainly buggers but they climb these trees quite easily, slowly placing one scaly foot ahead of the other on the gently sloping branches.




Rainbow lorikeet in bottlebrush, Woy Woy. Lorikeets are rather shy birds but as noisy as buggery in groups. At dawn they cluster excitedly in flowering trees, squabbling over the best blooms and waking up the neighbours.




Pink & grey galahs feeding in a jacaranda in someone's back yard in Umina.




Sulphur-crested cockatoo (white bird). Haven't yet got a decent photo of one of these. They move too quick and perch up high in tall trees.

The other birds are a couple of plump owls of some sort, a rainbow lorikeet hanging upside down to feed and there's a nervous-looking tree possum down the bottom.The black birds flying at the sides are black cockatoos, a seldom-sighted bird.


Colin

It's all over the internet that Colin's been put down (euthanased). Poor little bugger lost his mum last week and was found nuzzling a yacht in Pittwater, just across the water from here. A post-mortem revealed Colin was actually Colette and her mum's body may have been found washed up on a beach down south. Wildlife officers had to put the poor thing down as she was getting weaker and weaker and they couldn't feed her.

From the Herald:
"A female humpback whale abandoning her three-week-old calf? Not likely.

Experts say a baby whale alone in Sydney's Pittwater was probably separated from its mother by force. ...

The baby humpback, believed to be about two or three weeks old, was first spotted on Sunday, nuzzling up to a yacht in an apparent search for its mother.

Authorities have suggested that the calf, nicknamed Colin, may have a biological problem, which led its mother to abandon it.

Experts have disagreed, saying a humpback female is very unlikely to abandon her calf, and would nurture it if it was sick.

Wally Franklin, Hervey Bay-based marine biologist with research group the Oceania Project, says ships in the waters off Sydney could be to blame, because they can break up sonic communication lines between whales." (Humans could be to blame for stranded calf)

Sydney Morning Herald


The truth about mozzies

I posted a map and some stuff about the paperbark forest last month, the wee jewel officially known as the Everglades Lagoon Wetland, nestled amongst the paperbarks next to the local golf club.

The crowd that looks after the wetland is having walkies there next month, combined with talkies.

From their flyer:
"Everglades Wetland... Walk & Talk
Saturday 27th September, 2008
RSVP by 24th on (02) 43494756
Email: wetlands@cccen.org.au".


Nose to the grindstone

Spoke too soon about getting some time off. Got an unexpected job dropped into my lap. Some ghost-blogging. The writing sort not the woo woo sort.

So anyways, Tuesday's post may or may not be late. Put yer email in the thingy to get pinged.

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Palm Beach

While the Palm Beach ferry is a hot topic, let's pop back across to Palmy.




Pittwater and Brisbane Water ferry routes. The bottom route goes from Ettalong to Palm Beach and is the one threatened by the sandbank.

(Incidentally, everything on the green and blue map is on the Central Coast and everything on the blue map is in Sydney.)




Fantasea Crystal at Palm Beach. A comfy and efficient ferry but not exciting as ferries go.

These two are also of the Palm Beach fleet:

Crystal Spirit, at Wagstaffe
Myra & friend, wooden ferries at Palm Beach

Floating life - ferries, dingies, wooden boats, putt-putts, a hull, a raised wreck, and a sub




Lion Island from the Palm Beach ferry. I never get tired of Lion Island.

List of birds & beasts on Lion Island
Islands of Broken Bay







Seaplane at Palm Beach, with Barrenjoey Head behind it. The seaplane takes off from Sydney Harbour and does sightseeing tours up the coast to Pittwater.


Work work work

Have been working long hours. Hence the late posts recently. Made the deadline though and there's a bit of calmer water ahead, thank christ.

Theroy's

Theroy's is gone. It was one of my favourite buildings in the area. It was up at Point Clare on Brisbane Water Drive, just across from the Pt Clare railway station. It was an old chemist.

Built circa 1920, fibro with a fifties facade added onto the front of it and a shopkeeper's residence attached to the side (right). It had been empty for yonks and a new chemist built beside it, a brick job with a long switchback ramp, instead of steps, for the Dear Old Things to get up to the door.




The wee old shop is gone as well. It was between Theroy's and the corner of Talinga Avenue. It wasn't number 5. It had a couple more numbers but they kept dropping off. It might've been number 155 but don't quote me on that.

Can't be sure of the shop's date but I'm willing to say around 1900. As for the style, I'll go with Plain Old Shopfront. Which is not an official style but a well-known one.

Notice the window on this end of the shopfront is longer. The door used to be there. Or rather, the wee ramp up to the door used to be there. The door itself ws set back about eight feet from the front of the shop, in the old way, and the wee ramp led up to it. There's a similar style here in Ettalong, minus the ramp.




Between Theroy's and the wee old shop was a fibro house of uncertain age, which squatted silently behind a hedge. On the other side, on the corner of Talinga Avenue was a front yard of trees with another old fibro house lurking rustily behind them. I liked that corner. I liked the trees and the wee old house and I liked Theroy's. I don't care that they were mostly derelict, I liked them.

The fish shop is still there on the other corner.

Map showing the demolition/building site
Map showing Point Clare & Woy Woy


New blogging schedule

I'm still up to my eyeballs in work and likely to be for a wee while. So the new posting days are Wednesday and Saturday. Or Wednesday and Monday for all you buggers reading at work.

To get reminders to your inbox, stick yer email in the slot. The Feedblitz slot in the sidebar, just about the Babel Fish thingy.


Links un-bunged

Sorry. All this time I've had the link for the PM's Apology and all the Sorry posts empty and I never noticed. Might be time to see an optometrist. Anyways, they're fixed now.

And here's the link to the Canadian PM's Apology. Onya, Canada.


Links new

Skippys List, 213 things Skippy can't do in the army, is olden but golden.

A mate has gun pronz on his blog, Terminal Ballistics. (Do take the bullets out before you make the sex with your firearm, gun fans.)


Spiketionary

Babel Fish is a translator bot. It's named after a small wet fish invented by Douglas Adams. There is a link to it on my sidebar for the convenience of non-English speakers who read this blog.

BabelFish the bot translates from one language to another automatically. You just bung a slab of text into the bot and it translates it into your language.

It works on picking the most likely meaning of a word so you can get some very entertaining translations.

You can also get some weird and disturbing translations. F'rinstance, when I write 'a wee bit of rain' Babel Fish translates it to 'a urine part of rain' in some languages. This may cause alarm and dismay amongst innocent readers.

So, in the spirit of clearing things up, I've made another translation thingy, a Spiketionary.

(And I've added chook strangler to the Ducktionary by the way, Ron.)

Running late and out of timetable order

(If you have never stood on a platform waiting for a Sydney train, you won't get the joke in the title.)

I am up to my fucking eyeballs in work at the moment. Plus I'm off on holiday at the end of the week and won't be back until the 2nd of August or something. Should get time to bung something up before i go on holiday but I ain't promising. You can always look at pictures of boats and Freo.

(Keep scrolling down for How to blog

Umina Beach

This is what Umina Beach looks like when it's crowded. Drink it in.

Took these last week from Mt Ettalong Road on a warm day.



Remains of the old pool at Umina Beach, up the end amongst the rocks at the foot of Mount Ettalong. Not sure how long it's been there. Good fifty years at least I'm thinking.

It's been disintegrating for yonks but that lot of storms and big winds this year didn't do it any favours.

Didn't go walkies today. Too much fucking work still to do. I'm promising myself I'll piss work off on Wednesday but I've lied before.

And about that, this being yer own boss bizzo is a massive mound of malarky. It's s'posed to be all beer and skittles, sitting about in yer underpants having 3 hour lunches and stuff.

All I've had so far is sit at the computer in my underpants. No 3 hour lunches, wee bit of beer, no skittles. Nose to the bloody grindstone every day. It's tougher to bloody well stop working. No fair.

On the inside

(Freo Prison again. Loved that place.)



In the final year of the prison's life (1990) the prisoners were allowed to paint on their cell walls. These paintings area all prisoner art and it will come as no surprise to you that every single painting is of an outdoor scene.










These drawings are from the colonial period. In the post-colonial period the cell was used as a broom closet. The drawings were found when a patch of paint was accidentally knocked off. There's Perspex over the walls now to protect the drawings from the grubby paws of tourists.




The cell once housed a convict who had been trained as a commercial artist. 19th century commercial art training involved drawing certain classics over and over until you got them right.




There in his cell he drew from memory, using whatever he had that would make a mark. How he kept the drawings hidden is an unsolved mystery.


Doldrums

Went off yesterday for a end-of-Dr-Who-season barbie and got a wee bit smashed and sunburnt. Other than that I've been head down arse up since I got back working. Another long day of it tomorrow then there might be a day or two off.


Bungalow alert



For sale. Railway Street Woy Woy. Dunno if it's been been sold yet so be quick. And if you buy it then do evil renovations to it, I know where you live.

Sleepy

(Pictures)

I am not a happy wombat. It's a warm fresh autumn day and I just want to sleep.

Finished a thingy of work yesterday. A numbered list of 327 things wrong with someone's precious thesis. This is not job I recommend to the faint-hearted as it often involves dealing with the woolly-minded and the long-winded.

I don't do academic ghostwriting. That's a different kettle of fish and a naughty one. I do editing. I read through the thesis (or article for publishing or whatever) and email them stuff like 'Section 30, paragraphs 4-17: Extraneous' and 'Suggest re-think of theory behind Sections 57 & 108'. Then they open the email, read the list, feel faint, have a little cry and perhaps work on some of my suggestions.

The main qualifications for the job are an ability to detect bullshit disguised as theory, the ability to say 'that's very interesting but it won't get you a pass mark and I'm not doing it after March the 15th', and the ability to resist the larger fees for doing actual ghostwriting, even when said fees include headjobs.

(Yer bog standard, non-academic ghostwriting is perfectly legit. Some poor hack is forced to listen to an inarticulate sports star or other celeb then put together an "autobiography" of that person. The ghostwriter does the work but the author on the cover is the celeb. The other common use of ghostwriting to reproduce the writing style and substance of a bestselling but now deceased author.)

Anyways, I did this job and I did it well and it was a Bad Thing. I took the bigger fee for doing a rush job and I worked on it long and hard. Which is how I got sick in the first place. That and injudicious applications of beer and pizza.

I'm pissed off. I slipped back into old habits after I promised myself I wouldn't. I've barely had time to scratch my arse for weeks, it's taken a month to read my blog list and anyone who rings me does so at their peril.

On a chirpier note, it's a beautiful day, I can have a snooze on my balcony once I've posted this and I've got some more sunny Saratoga photos:



Willaroo Road comes of Steyne Road and down to the sailing club. On the right as it levels out there's Saratoga Oval and on the left there's the tennis club and the Saratoga Wetland. The oval has a cricket pitch on it and a couple of climbing thingies for kids at the water's edge. It's a quiet spot to sit and enjoy the warm autumn sun and the quiet sound of the waves among the mangroves.

Sitting there at the water's edge Mount Pleasant, the hill of Saratoga, is behind you. Ahead is Koolewong with its aerial. To your right you can see along to western shore of Brisbane Water up to Gosford. Then the bulk of Green Point sitting at the water end of Kincumba Mountain blocks your view of East Gosford. (Map)


(Embiggen)

A slow muddy stream through the Wetland and ducks silently floating. The houses are on Steyne Road and the hill is Mount Pleasant. The walkway through the Wetland goes from behind the tennis courts on Willaroo Road to the end of Marian Street. For most of the walkway you can see only the mangroves and the top of Mount Pleasant and Blackwall Mountain over at Woy Woy. There's a lot of walks like that around Brisbane Water. I love it.


(Embiggen)

A pleasant house on Henderson Road. I particularly like how it's overcome its seventies origins with a nice not-seventies colour scheme and a not-seventies veranda. And the garden smelt good.


(Embiggen)

This photo captures the sleepy mood I'm in. Warm sun, quiet, gentle rhythm of the water lapping and little else. In more practical terms we're looking at the back half of Pelican Island on the left, Waterfall Bay behind it across the railway line and Koolewong in the middle.


(Embiggen)

The tide was low-ish and the seaweed floated near the surface. There was nary an uneaten rock oyster to be had (as usual). There were a few dozen tiny brown fish, like whitebait only brown. Over at Woy Woy Wharf and hour earlier whitebait had been moving about in the green water around the piers.


That's yer lot for today and I'm off out to my balcony with a quilt and a cuppa tea.