FEBURARY, 2001
Latitude 27 degrees 11 minutes 06 seconds South
Longitude: 153 degrees 06 minutes 03 seconds East
Scarborough Harbor Marina
February arrived with the invasion of the blue bottle jellyfish. Thousands of them started coming into the bay where the marina is located. Nobody seemed to know why they were taking refuge in the marina, but the water was so thick with the floating blue bulbs that at night it looked like a giant gin and tonic with ice cubes floating about! I called it the night of the blue jellies; the kids called it jellyfish soup. While I thought it was a marvelous occasion to have all these strange blue jellies around, they started to cause havoc with the boats in the marina. Most boats have water intake holes in their haul to cool their refrigeration and other various systems. Well, there were so many blue jellies around that they started to get sucked up into these water intake holes in the boats. You could see jellyfish floating around with big chunks gone out of them. Even we didn’t escape the problem of the jellyfish. We noticed that our refrigerator had quit working, so David took apart the freshwater intake pump only to find it full of jellyfish parts! Poor little guys probably had no idea what was happening. The jellyfish hung around for a few days and then have never been seen again. Very strange!
February also brought the arrival of my friend Scott from Seattle. He happened to be on a round the world trip and was passing through Australia. He was brave enough to spend a few days of marina boat living with us. It was so hot while Scott was here that we didn’t feel like exerting a lot of energy. We did have a giant water fight on the dock with Hamish, Virgine and Kate. Hamish is a little 9 year Kiwi (New Zealander), Virgine is a 6 year old Canadian and 7 year old Kate is from the boat Voyager of Portland Oregon.
The kids were armed with the dock fire hoses and squirt guns while David and Scott grabbed the water hoses from the boats. Cool fun was had by all. There wasn’t a dry scrap among them. Later in the afternoon we decided to teach these kids how to play baseball, something they don’t have down here in the land of cricket! Hamish kept trying to bowl the ball when pitching and Virgine had no idea what to do. So it was an interesting game to say the least. The next day we gave Scott a tour of Brisbane and then went to a football (rugby) game that evening. The next day we took a trip up into the hinterland (what the Aussies call the mountains). We saw many beautiful sites in the mountains and had a nice hike through a tropical rainforest where we saw little wallabies, many beautiful trees, a kookaburra and a giant goanna (a giant lizard looking thing). Scott soon departed for point’s further north and we returned to life in the marina.
David decided that we had gotten too soft on our voyage across the ocean and found a gym for us to join. Lee from Voyager liked the idea as well, so now we have a morning routine of going to the gym to try and get some of that muscle back. It turns out the gym also offer yoga classes, something I’ve always wanted to try, so Lee and I go to the yoga class 2 times a week and are constantly amazed at our 80 year old instructor! We are all becoming quite flexible.
I had the kids over for a day of valentines making. Imaginations were running wild that day. We also found a mini golf course so we started having mini golf tournaments with Kate and Hamish. We eventually heard the sad news that the golf course is being torn down to make way for a museum so the last tournament was held the last week of February with prizes given for the most improved and best boy.
We had several more baseball games, this time we were joined by some of the adults. We had fun teaching these foreigners how to play our national pass time. The major sport of Australia and New Zealand is a game called cricket. We have yet to figure it out, but it is way bigger then baseball is in the USA. The other two major sports are football (rugby) and Swimming. Gotta love a country that values swimming as a major sport!
David and I continue to chip away the list of little projects. Mine are mostly sewing while I let David deal with the mechanical things.
We‘ve become very comfortable driving on the left side of the road and maneuvering around these roundabouts. They don’t have stop signs at the intersections; instead they have a giant roundabout. For those of you who don’t know what a round about is, it’s a large landscaped circle in the middle of the intersection, so when you come up on it you just take your turn entering the roundabout and drive around the circle until you find the road you want to pass on to. So we are becoming a new kind of driver. We also are becoming comfortable with the metric system. Learning to drive in kilometers per hour and becoming a fair judge on distances given in kilometers. Gas is purchased in liters instead of gallons. We also have learned to equate that then when the temperature is 30 degrees or above its very very very hot! We like those temperatures to be down in the middle 20’s. So we are becoming good Australians learning the metric system, driving on the wrong side of the road and using some of those strange words in our everyday life!
New Australian terminology for the day:
Giveway: is the same as a yield sign at a road intersection
Overtaking Lane: is the same as a passing lane when driving
Half shot: means you are drunk
The Lot: means everything. They always ask you when you are shopping if that’s “the lot?” which means is that everything?
Dunny: toilet
Tinny: a metal dinghy type boat with an outboard motor, used mostly for fishing
No worries: no problem.
Fortnight: every two weeks