A fly-over (just)

It is time to talk a little about the set-up at Topi.  As evident from my comments about the access road in wet weather (and the quietness) it isn’t exactly metropolitan.  Reflecting this, and general awareness of issues, the place is pretty self-sufficient.  The water is collected rain run-off from the roof (so is in good supply at present) and electricity is generated by solar panels in the front grassed area. 

The latter are interesting as they are on a system which tracks the sun, to ensure the panels get the maximum rays through the day.  The two images following show the positions at 8AM and 2PM.

 This can lead to the occasional strange noise in the night as the system winds back to position the panels correctly for the morning.  It does mean that one has to think a little about what one is running so the system doesn’t get overloaded or the batteries drained (I presume it is for this reason that one is asked to only run the washing machine on a sunny day).  This has just caused me to flashback along the technological spectrum to our time in Tanzania where a generator had to be used during the frequent failures of the electricity grid, and again one had to be careful not to overload the system.  (In that case one knew when overloading occurred, as the generator jumped all over the veranda, spewing oil!)

On our last visit the one slight downside of the area was the use by the RAAF of the emptier bit overhead for flying around.  As an ex-military friend has commented about Hornets “Noisy sods aren’t they.” This morning I said to Frances how nice it was that they weren’t around this trip, hoping I wasn’t invoking anything.   Unfortunately I was: and Phantoms are about as noisy as Hornets. I have realised that they don’t fly on the weekends (hint to Australia’s enemies – at least the ones who don’t operate through the stock market -  launch your attack at 5pm Friday!).  I appreciate that the pilots have to keep up their hours, but I wonder why they have to do it over a settled area, especially given the millions of square km of ocean available just to the East. 

Perhaps they have realised I am typing this.  A Phantom just came over at no more than 500ft altitude (Frances saw it through the lounge window while sitting in a chair) and very high speed and decibels.  I have done some rough estimates of the horizontal position of the flight path and the angle of view and then applied basic geometry.  This gave an elevation of somewhere between 100m and 200m,   Perhaps the air safety people (CASA) can follow the Tiger Airways example and ground them for flying too low?

I had thought to do a whale watching trip from Forster today.  However the weather forecast on the TV last night (in the limited way one can make sense of the 7:25pm forecast from ABC Sydney) seemed to suggest strong winds today so I decided that land based watching from the Seal Rocks lighthouse was a better bet. It was absolutely top.  As we walked up to the lighthouse people coming down all said about the whales being visible and before we got to the top I saw a very big whale do a full breach.  They were coming through quite close to shore (the closest were certainly less than 500m out) so I got one half reasonable snap and we had many excellent views.  My guess is three pods each of 4 –6 whales went by in the hour or so we were there.

On the way back down to the beach I saw a pod of approximately 20 Common Dolphins hooning about in the bay.  I also saw a bunch of 4x4s on the beach: this is allowed by NPWS while pooches are of course strongly forbidden.  What a set of values and common sense!

 Some nice rocks were snapped

before heading off to a shop (aka the Post Office) for pies.  We did a bit of rock pool exploring after lunch and got some nice pictures of sea anemones and some passing pelicans.

In the evening a small vertebrate war erupted.  This was occasioned by hearing something rattling in a dresser full of glasses.  On investigation I found a hole had been chewed in the back of the dresser and with some examination identified a small rodent lurking therein as the culprit.  I persuaded it to leave its hiding place but this was not noticed by the small dog so the rodent made it to safety somewhere else in the house.