Making a splash

On Friday, IXL brought her lovely traditional wooden river boat to visit and when one clambers along her deck she leans, so to traverse from stern to bow, to feel perfectly safe, one needs harness and pitons.

The task of releasing lines fell to me but on the way I lost hold of a handhold and over the side I tumbled, cap, glasses and worst of all, i-phone!

Glasses, cap, wallet and me were all saved, but the i-phone, despite being doused in fresh water and placed into a plastic bag with silicon crystals is dead. My old Nokia, long since retired, survived a similar dunking because it was immediately disassembled, battery and sim card out, front face off, washed in fresh water then dried. But the i-phone does not come apart! Any ideas?

Her guests were Lyn, psychologist, John, radio producer and Ruth, photographer. But with dry clothes I rejoined the party and we were off. Just around the corner we anchored off a little waterfall and had lunch IXL had prepared beforehand of roast pork belly and veal, with antipasto and salad following her exquisite entrée, seafood terrine made with goats cheese and prawns wrapped in pink salmon slices all washed down with iced white wine. Life's tough.

So we had a lovely day, with free counselling for IXL, free advice on converting files to MP3 for me and Ruth took plenty of photographs, unfortunately. Haha!


PS. I have not gone crazy. Blogger is doing its thing, changing fonts, colours and underlining as it sees fit!

Evidence of crime comes to light after seventy years.

Yeomans Bay was empty when we arrived to take up a public mooring, but there was a problem.
In bold black was the caveat. '14 metres max. Penalty $3,300'. Heavy Metal is 16.4 M, so we moved away and dropped anchor in 11 metres in a moderate wind and tied the stern off to a rock to protect a Tupperware yacht on a mooring within swinging range.
So why am I boring you with this?

During WWII, in this area of wooded bays of deep water surrounded by high sandstone hills, ships were hidden from Japanese submarines operating off the coast. In Refuge Bay, just a few miles away, a captured Japanese fishing boat, renamed Krait after the deadly little sea snake of the same name, was prepared for her heroic journey to Singapore where this little fishing boat successfully penetrated Japanese defences and using canoes and limpet mines, her Australian crew destroyed 35,000 tons of Japanese shipping then escaped in the confusion to return untouched to Australia.

While untying the stern line I noticed an anomaly in the waterside vegetation and investigated. There I found a nest of very old beer bottles, some broken, some not and took one for closer investigation. This thick dark brown bottle is inscribed; 'This bottle is the property of'' around the neck, then around the base; 'The NSW Bottle Co Pty Ltd' followed by a crest, then; 'I.S. 89D1411971', under which is a double ring of raised lumps that would  make it a little less likely to slip.

As far as I can ascertain, these bottles were produced back when glass containers were returned to bottlers to be refilled and they paid about 6 pence each for them. The inscriptions and numbers suggest they were bought between 1930 and 1950 so considering the history of this bay, one can imagine a scenario that brought these bottles to this place.

Imagine a few dozen Australian servicemen holed up here waiting, bored and thirsty. These were young men with guts who had volunteered for very dangerous missions.

They were resourceful and bold so it is not difficult to believe some would steal a one dozen case of beer from Stores and have a little drunken soirée, leaving the tell tale bottles under the thick forest floor where they lay hidden for almost seventy years.

.......................

To read an excellent account of the Krait adventure, see. www.lynettesilver.com/bookkrait.html
Pic Heavy Metal in Yeomans Bay courtesy Gerhard Malan, http://www.svsunnyspells.com