Impulse buy of the year. David and I were at Hayden Pies in Ulladulla and the idea of getting a catamaran popped into our heads again. Using the 4 bars of HSPA and our trusty Android phones, it wasn’t long till we had the eBay app loaded and sourced a boat that went off in about 4hrs. The conversation went something like “should we bid?” … “hmm it looks good” … “should we do it?” …. “hmmm I dunno…” … “YES, do it!” “go for it!?!?:” hahahahhahaa. So yeah, we ended up with a catamaran. I chose this picture not for it’s photographic value but more or less a reminder to how amateur we are at sailing… in the backyard. It took us many times to figure out how to actually rig it up and this was a victory moment. Our maiden voyage was another story in itself but we basically overloaded it, mildly sunk it and had to get rescued.

This is red. I’ve had in the back of my mind to try and get photos that represent RGB (Red, Green, Blue). This will be the first of this series. Once I’ve figured out green and blue I’ll link them together. The other shots are just some random ones taken from a weekend down the south coast.

Download: 640×360 77mb
Download: 1280×720 200mb

We left the rain and headed north on Sunday night stopping at Newcastle to sort out Pete’s lease and get some essentials from woolies. Another stop for Maccas then onwards to Smiths Lake. The drive was was good with minimal traffic. We arrived around 11pm and setup the WDTV for some comedy entertainment of The IT Crowd and South Park to relax after the drive.

Monday

More South Park then a trip into Forster for a big mammoth grocery shop to last the week then off to the beach and a spot of fishing to take us to dinner time, making the best of the weather and sunshine!

The beach turned out to be psycho with a massive swell. We had to stick with knee deep frolicking but even that didn’t last long as the seaweed was getting churned up and we were out of there to organise a bbq. Our bbq was a solid cookup with steak, spuds & salad although we were bombarded with kookaburras and funny turkey looking things.

Ross is making a delicious home made chocolate pudding for dessert to get us started with super desserts.

Tuesday

We woke up about 9am to another gorgeous, sunny day. Checked the surf report online while we watched a selection of music videos. Pete strolled in last and we decided to make pancakes for breakfast. Ross whipped up the mix and Noor took over with the spatula to cook the little suckers up. Some lemon, sugar, bananas and a copious amount of maple syrup later we were all ready to hit the beach.

We thought we’d better take advantage of the good weather so we headed out to Seal Rocks. We brought along our collection of high priced cameras and took some photos of the Sugarloaf Point lighthouse.

The water looked gorgeous from high above the beach and it was. We spent a good hour body surfing and another on the beach soaking up the sun before we decided to head home for some nachos.

Nachos was a really late lunch / dinner at about 5:30pm. We ran out of time to get bait and go fishing so we opted for a tourist walk around Forster to get some photos on sunset. We walked out to the end of the breakwall and snapped a few night photos then on the way back we found a small geocache hidden in a gazebo type of thing. It was only a small one so no treasure was found.

We headed back to the house and watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall followed by season 2 of The Inbetweeners.

Wednesday

Woke up and had breakfast whilst watching Bad Boys 2. The morning dissappeared and we lost a few more hours cooking fajitas for lunch. We had to do a quick trip ino Forster to refuel the car and pickup some bait for an attempt at fishing. Once back at the house we loaded up with rods and headed out to Sandbar for a fishing adventure that lasted about 2 casts. The beach was pulling strongly to the right and the wind wasn’t helping our casting. Within a few minutes our sinkers were getting washed up onto the sand. Dissappointed but still keen we turned around and threw a line into Smiths Lake. A can of pepsi helped us contemplate our next move which was to reel in the lines and jump in the water. We couldn’t find a channel that went more than waist deep, even though we walked/crawled/swam over 200m towards the centre of the lake. As it was so shallow, the water temperature was beautiful. We stayed there till the sunset and managed to snap these photos with the little Samsung U10.

Back at the house we cooked up another epic meal being a korma curry.

Thursday

We got ourselves up out of bed a little earlier and were organised to go swimming by about 11. We took a drive out to Seal Rocks as we knew the beach was pretty well protected from the big swells. The water was incredibly nice, there were no rips, currents, seaweed or giant waves to deter us from the water. It was a very leisurely swim with good waves for body surfing and it wasn’t long till we had to observe 5 bikinis being paraded on the sand. As we were floating around in the crystal clear waters, a massive ray came within 10m of us and headed towards Ross. A few girly screams later and we managed to avoid any major carnage. The fish life was incredible, birds were divebombing little baitfish whilst a pack of dolphins swam by and no doubt took their share of fish. There were also larger fish, perhaps whiting that were visible in the waves and at one point an entire school swam beneath our feet, literally hundreds heading in a tight pack towards the rocks. I felt like I was swimming in an aquarium but there were no signs of sharks

I also had the action cam which can go underwater, so we did a bit of exploring around the rocks to see what lived beneath the surface. Unfortunately I didn’t really see anything other than seaweed. Noor and I scrambled up on the rocks and enjoyed the view whilst Ross went to explore some photo locations with the possibility of bumping into some bikinis. Back on the beach we cooled our oranges in the surf by playing catch. Oranges float really well so you can chuck them out to sea and they come back. This entertained us for long enough for the oranges to cool after sitting in the sun. They were good oranges as well, no seeds but juicy. This was later washed down with some ginger beer. Something about salt water, citrus and ginger that tastes great. Noors feet got roasted by the sun.

Once the bikinis left we decided to hit the road as the scenery diminished. On the way back to the house we stopped by the local butcher and picked up some snags for a late bbq lunch. We cooked down at the Smiths Lake boatramp and observed the sunset. A secondary stop at the butcher on the way back to the house was needed for some chicken breasts which would later be turned into chicken pajamas with a little handywork from masterchef Ross. Whilst preparing dinner we watched a few music videos then fired up The Girl Next Door. We all agreed that Elisha Cuthbert should be in more movies.

PROBLEM

We ran out of ice cream! It was an emergency trip into Forster with a few photos along the way.

After an act of cold cock humour on the fridge door we had to settle with Connoisseur Caramel Honey Macadamia Ice Cream that also happens to hold the title of best ice cream of 2008-2009. Zoom, back to the house to cookup the chicken. We added breadcrumbs, pasta sauce, ham & grated cheese on top. 40mins in the oven and it was cooked to perfection. Once we got our protein overload it was time for one last epic super dessert. This one included chocolate pancakes, ice cream, sprinkles, honeycomb, banana and maple syrup. Ross’s recipe is up there competing with Pancakes on the Rocks.

As we only got 3/4 through The Girl Next Door we watched the ending then finished the night watching Fight Club.

Friday

After the success of Thursdays swim at Seal Rocks we wasted no time in getting back out there to frolick in the water. There was a lack of bikinis this time and the water dropped about 4 degrees overnight. It was cold.. to the point where you could cut glass on Noors nipples. It wasn’t that nice no matter how clear the water was. The lack of waves meant we were standing around a lot more which kinda sucked. We opted to scavenge the rocks whilst Ross took photos at the previously scouted locations. It wasn’t long till we spotted some crabs and after annoying them for a bit they decided to walk across the sand to the other rocks. I couldn’t help myself and had to pick them up. I felt like Bear Grylls in a Man vs Wild stunt, although the crabs were hardly a meal as you can see from this photo.

As always, the last day of roadtrips suck. We had to pack up and clean up the house. Load everything back into the car then make our way back towards Sydney. After a 5 day sunny stretch we travelled about 50 kilometres to what seemed like a backlog of 5 years of moisture in the atmosphere. The clouds had explosive diarrhea that concentrated on the car. I always thought that the number 2 wiper setting was a little excessive however in this downpour I needed an extra notch to crank it up to 3. As we passed spun out cars, people with hazard lights on, cars pulled over, zero visibility of lanes and had the occasional aqua plane we stopped at Maccas & the servo to refuel ourselves and the car.

After about 20 minutes we thought the rain had eased only to find that a further 10 minutes of driving, we were back into it like the world was against us. At one point we were down to 60km/h on a three lane 110km/h freeway. Hectic and epic at the same time. Amongst all of this mayhem there were still people driving like they had seen The Fast and the Furious for the first time attempting to get infront of the clouds (that stretched from Queensland to Victoria) like a P-plater in a shitbox car with a milo tin exhaust. Just as the clouds ran out of liquid and the full force of the storm eased off a little and we were off the freeway, hooray we made it. It wasn’t long till we had a typical Camry driver try and run into us by pulling out infront of us. I should have seen it coming, I need to automate my reactions to something like this…

IF { visibility == Toyota Camry }
THEN hit the brakes
ELSE yell abuse

Yes, I do have a thing against Camry drivers.

We did make it home safe, although it was one of the most memorable drives I’ve ever done. We have to look back at how lucky we were to have left in a psycho storm and return in a mammoth storm and enjoy the inbetween bit which was perfect.

FULL PHOTO GALLERY HERE –>

Download the video – 28mb

David and I went down the coast for the weekend. I wanted to test out my camera in the surf, it’s a bit shaky but after reviewing this initial footage I’m sure I can improve on this. It has been ages since I’ve been in the surf and we had a great day for it. The water was still cold, hence why we’re wearing wetsuits but it was a lot of fun.

Download this video – 19mb

This video shows the ATC2K mounted in different locations on my bike riding The Oaks firetrail from Woodford to Glenbrook.

Had some time to kill, it was a great day so I grabbed my camera with a polariser filter and went for a walk along the break wall on Knobby’s Beach and took a few photos.

More PHOTOS in the Gallery –>

* WPG2 CANNOT LOCATE GALLERY2 ITEM ID 8841 *

Here’s a few pics that I’ve touched up from the photos I took last weekend.