2014

Episode 1

Well, here I am back again sitting on Heather's sofa in Arundel having flown over with David on Malaysian. I did have high hopes of being abducted by Aliens en-route as must have happened to MH370 just a week earlier. Not making light of the disappearance of this flight you understand, but so far it seems as likely an explanation as most that have been put forward to date. After an uneventful flight and a visit to the "tribute wall" at Kuala Lumpa airport both David and I arrived safe and sound in Arundel. Lyn arrived a couple of weeks later having spent that time at home sorting out the mess David and I left behind so she says.

For those of you who have followed my previous blogs I will now attempt to fill you in on what I have been doing over the summer whilst vegetating on the lounge at Burnett Heads. I did sit out on the veranda for a few days but then it was decided that I would fade greatly if left there for too long as I was in strong sunshine each morning.

Both my humans kept quite busy. David took one look at the Kingswood in the garage and decided that it needed to be resprayed before he could attempt to sell it. For those of you who don’t know what a Kingswood is I can tell you that it is a Holden sedan car from the mid 1970’s and belonged to Lyn’s mother. It has sat in the garage for many years and now a decision has been made that it really should be sold to someone who could get some use and please out of this now 'classic’ car. So David set to and resprayed it in the original colours, white and silver grey. It was not completely re-assembled when we left though the paint job was complete.

Lyn kept disappearing down the each at odd hours of the day and night, night mostly: I was told I couldn’t go down as I would get full of sand and that was a definite no no. I would quickly end up on the scrap heap if that should happen.

Lyn’s reason for these frequent trips to the beach is because she is a volunteer with the group that monitors the ‘loggerhead’ turtles that nest on our Oaks Beach during the summer months. As the turtles may appear at any time during the hours of darkness volunteers like to keep a watch on the beach all night. Visiting tourists can cause problems walking along the beach with flashlights that scare the nesting females off so the volunteers like to gather the tourists together and when a female is settled and beginning to lay then they take the tourists as a group down to watch the turtle at close quarters. When the hatchlings began to ‘run’ in late January the nests are monitored so that as many of the hatchlings as possible make it into the sea safely. Beyond that their fate lays in the ‘lap of the Gods”. L will try and load some sort bits of video at the end of this showing the emerging hatchlings that ‘swim’ up through the sand and into the big wide world. Needless to say she usually comes home at some odd hour of the night covered in sand from crawling around the beach mostly in the pitch dark. She also goes from a swim in the surf every morning: The volunteers are connected with the research centre at Mon Repos, just 3 k’s down the coast at the Mon Repos Nature Conservation Park.

There were a few very high tides but only one weekend when this was combined with strong winds that caused major erosion on the beach. That was back at the end of January and did entail a mad scrabble to re-locate several nests that became exposed with the wild seas. Several metres of our small beach were eroded away. Perhaps with the right currents and winds it will build up again over the winter months as it sometimes does.

David has done some work on the Range Rove since his return to England but then had a long wait for some part of other so it is not actually in going condition as my secretary writes this, hopefully it will be shortly as the part has just arrived.

That’s about all there is to say for the present:

© Lynette Regan 5th April 2014