The weather possibly looks better

It does at least look better out of the window.  However I have just watched the ABC TV news and they are talking about the levee at Kempsey (about 150 road kms South, where we filled up with petrol) being breached later this morning.  The Pacific Highway is ‘ímpassable’- presumably just to the North of that town where it goes across the cow paddocks.  They also mentioned a funnel cloud causing a lot of damage at Red Rocks (the next village North).  That is a bit of an issue for us as I was planning to visit that location in the next couple of days to tick Beach Stone–curlew. 

We started the day (as always) with a walk for Tammie.  Our favourite here seems to be a 6km jobbie going down to Arrawarra Beach.  It is a very pleasant stroll covering a range of habitats from what I believe to be Wet sclerophyll forest, some wet heath, a small patch of rainforest (?? it is very small and low but has a lot of creepers and epiphytes);

a dry heathy ‘(also wet this week) headland, a boardwalk through Melaleuca/Mangove forest

and some pleasant housing.  As far as Tammy is concerned, one of the aspects of this trip is that she is getting to meet a whole bunch of other dogs as we go on these walks: she is getting pretty blasé about this.

I had found that we could connect to a Netspace server through the phone line.  This let me look at my emails but was so slow I gave up.  In Dar es Salaam the net service we used was expecting to be used through dial up on Tanzanian phone lines (thus a download speed of about 20kbps on a good day).  Unfortunately gmail is designed for broadband and even their basic service is too graphics-heavy for a dial-up service.  So I decided to go for the library in Coffs Harbour.

That was found quite easily.  They offer two internet access packages: locals get an hour and visitors get 30 minutes.  As this is free it is impossible to complain!  I did what I needed to in about 20 minutes and became aware that the young couple next to me were (a) speaking French and (b) looking with some concern at the RTA website coverage of the floods on the Pacific Highway. 

I decided that sticking my nose in to their business was possibly in order.  They were heading for Sydney where they had to return their campervan on Friday.  They had two choices: (a) hope that the floods go down by tomorrow or (b) go back to Grafton and come down the New England Highway.  As option b added 400km to their trip they were quite keen on option a.  My contribution was to look up the address of the NRMA Office in Coffs and suggest they go there for advice. (I also suggested stressing the French accent.  The fact that the female of the couple was totally charming would not have been a negative.)  Given that the river in Kempsey – the main villain thus far - was not expected to peak until later on 15/6, and the weather system had many more rivers to play with as it moved South I reckon option b was the go.

We have just seen the SBS news coverage of the floods.  They reckon it could be another 5 days before the Highway is open again.  So option b is definitely the go!

While I was doing this Frances went to the Coffs Regional Gallery and to suss out the shops.  The former was not exciting and the latter didn’t involve great outlays (but the pull-apart from Bakers Delight was very nice for lunch).   We then headed for the Coffs Harbour Botanic Gardens. This was, as always, a great place.  The birding highlight occurred when Frances spotted a bird on the ground.  This was a Noisy Pitta, which I hadn’t seen since Dunk Island in about 1995!  My photo was hopeless, so has been trashed.  The one of a Brush Turkey digging a hole – what else do turkeys do? – was a bit better.  I added 6 species to the trip list at this venue.

I was intrigued that the mangroves were not totally inundated.  Things must drain really quickly here as Woolgoolga Creek had also gone back to its channel.  Coffs Creek was sufficiently low that a vandalised shopping trolley was largely exposed, and provided a good drying perch for a Darter.

We came across some sculptures in one of the 'rainforesty' areas of the Gardens and although the image is rather dark I thought it worth including here.

On getting home I took Tammie for a walk along the beach.  It was interesting that there was a massive amount of broken cunjevoi washed up.  Presumably it takes a bit of time for the tide to bring it in.  After that I went for my first run of the trip.  This was a fairly undulating, but quite honest, 4km.  So I can feel virtuous about a couple of glasses of red and possibly the odd cleansing ale while watching the State of Origin match tonight!

A dry day: only 37.4mm of rain!