A town called Cygnet

There is a very pretty town in northwest of Tasmania called Penguin. They have an an endearing large concrete penguin, and some penguin-shaped rubbish bins. Lately they have revved up the penguinity to the point where its starting to look like the town was named after the bins, as a gimmick.

On the other hand, Cygnet eschews the baby swan as a civic theme - I don't think saw one anywhere. Today we retraced our steps from Australia Day, primarily to take pedalboats out on the Huon River at Huonville. We were ran out of time to do it the other day, but since we have broken free of Little Athletics and can do as we please on Saturday morning, we went back to the river.

it was a perfect still and sunny morning. We were the first punters for the day I think - the boats had been baking in the sun and the plastic seats cooked our backsides. Michael and I took Boat 1 and Elf and Marcus Boat 2. Michael's tender young bot was in pain, so he developed an impressive pedalling technique where it hovered a few inches above the seat.

In no time my legs were in agony - I am about 6 foot and the ideal height for the seat-to-pedal distance is probably about 5'4" (I think the boats were made in North Korea). So we pedalled and rested in equal amounts. Michael, as well as being my human son, is a cartoon character, and has learnt a lot of moves lately from Tom and Jerry. "Resting" for Michael is a performance that involves stretching, hands behind head, legs crossed and propped up on something, and even puffing an imaginary cigar (when he is really giving it everything but the kitchen sink).

In no time Elf and Marcus caught up to us. Boat 2 was faulty and splashy - not serenely silent like ours. We docked together like spacecraft and spent some quality family time together in midstream. There were lovely reflections, ducks, landlubbers waving at us and a large redbrick pub that looked enticing from any angle.

However. We set a course for our home port and gave back Boats 1 and 2, and went on to Cygnet for some lunch. Things were bubbling along, the Red Velvet Lounge (which is the heart of everything) was open, and the Targa Tasmania cars were chugging through town and parking everywhere.

Targa is an annual road race - I think the serious term is "tarmac rally". They close proper everyday roads to have the race, in different stages, all over the state. Along with them in a non-racing capacity go a whole heap of old cars. Today we saw a couple of Model T-ish age, up to the 70s cars I grew up with like Toranas and Monaros. Over half the cars were MGs.

My favourite was the Jowett Javelin - in a colour I would call British Church Fete Green. I didn't have a camera but thanks to the internet:

We popped into the RVL for a very nice lunch, then walked up and down the main drag with ice-creams. Cygnet is a bit of a tree-change town, and has a hippy element. Our beautiful table came from there, and I believe they run a very good Folk Festival, but they also have a shop that sells proficient but kitschy hippy/goth art, crystals and dreamcatchers. I always run a mile from dreamcatchers so we were out of there pretty fast and on the road home again.

Further thoughts from aboard a tuna boat

[Some more about yesterday's fishing expedition.]

We were out there for such a long time, with so little action, that after a while I was just staring into space. It was not a large boat - you had to find somewhere comparatively comfortable to lean and just settle in there.

The basalt stacks of the coastline are pretty amazing. Tasman Island has an unbelievable timber platform perched above the rocks, with an almost-vertical tramway up which supplies were winched to the now-decommissioned lighthouse.

We couldn't see the top of the island yesterday due to sea fog. Wikipedia to the rescue.

How did they ever get anything onto the platform?

Interesting and beautiful as all of this is, I was finding it less novel after about six hours of circling around. At least I wasn't leaning over the rail the whole time like Dan. It must have seemed like an eternity to him, as he couldn't even see where we were going. I started to think about eternity too.

The rocks are being bashed constantly by the sea. I understand the "constantly" part a lot better now. Every day, all night, no breaks for weekends - down here it just doesn't stop. It's been happening for hundreds of thousands of years, and will keep happening no matter what. It's happening now.

I thought about how I would go living on one of the islands. I'd be eating a lot of raw seabird eggs, I decided. The birdlife all around was very varied. Gulls and albatrosses and terns and ... prions? The albatrosses could glide into view, glide about just above the waves until your neck got stiff and your eyes hurt from watching, then glide off around behind the boat and out of view, all without a flap. Incredibly efficient. Smaller birds were flapping like nobodies' business - they must have to eat a lot more than the albatross I suppose. But not too much at once - then you can't fly. A tricky business. I love how seabird eggs are the pointiest, so that if they roll, they roll in a circle and not off the rocky ledge.

We saw a lot of basking seals on the rocks, but more fascinating were the ones in the water. In pounding waves that would have drowned me in a few minutes, the seals attitude was more akin to a Tuesday night in the lounge room, with not much on the telly. Idly rolling and lolling, waving a flipper here and a tail there. Just hanging out in the 3-4 metre swell. "Hi, humans! Catching any tuna? No? We've got heaps!! Hahahahahaha!! BRAAAAAAAP."

Some pictures of the rocks I sailed around today for 8 hours

My boss paid for us all to take a work day off today, and go tuna fishing off the south coast. That's pretty good isn't it? He's a pretty fantastic boss. So I am not going to post any pictures of him asleep in the Big Fish Fighting Chair.

We were out there for eight hours - Steve was very keen to catch some bluefin. We got one bluey, and three stripy tuna, so a pretty quiet day really. After about 5 hours I was ready to get off the boat, to be honest.

We had some casualties. Two workmates threw up early on, then found somewhere to sleep. A third actually spent the whole trip bent over the rail, head down, occasionally getting waveslapped in the face while throwing up. The whole eight hours. Once we were back on land, he pulled himself together and was his usual charming self. Which to my mind wins Effort of the Day.

Nathan's face says "I caught it, but I can't eat it. Or anything else."

Like the tuna, Jeff is strangely attracted to the squiddly lures.

Ignoring the cries for help

Every afternoon at about 3.45, the cries for help start. Through the wall behind me, two men yell sporadically, one after the other, things we can't understand. Then after a bit of that, they yell together "HELLLLP! HELLLLLP!" There is a very old firedoor there, and so I guess the sound comes through there rather than through the foot-thick sandstone walls. One of our neighbours somewhere in this labyrinthine Arts Centre is the Terrapin Puppet Theatre, so we have guessed that it is they, rehearsing some ground-breaking whimsical hi-jinks. I can tell by their voices that they have beards and ride old fixy-gear bikes.

Across Salamanca Place there is some heavy construction happening on the Princes Wharf shed. Meanwhile, a very strange ship named the Maria has replaced the Aurora Australis. The Maria has another very large boat on top of it. That's right, on top. The Maria has absolutely enormous cranes, and it seems like it has been trying to unburden itself of the hitchhiking boat, but to no avail so far. There is endless banging, sirens, boops and whoops. Every now and then people down on the wharf shout "Left, left, LEFT, STOOPPPP!! STOP, FOR F*CKS SAKE!"

So every time we hear "HEELLLLLLLLLPPPP!!!!" through the wall it takes a little while to process that no, no-one has been crushed by a boat.

Boating, battling

On Sunday we went boating with Imp and Ed and the girls. It's Royal Hobart Regatta weekend, so we had our own tiny regatta by the slimy sucking mud of Castle Forbes Bay. The plan was to drive down to the Huon River at Franklin and hop in the water there, but there was nowhere for the kids to play safely when not on the water. We went a bit further south, where the river broadens out and there are a few bays. Where we ended up had a couple of little shingle beaches between the expanses of evil mud.

We launched the Tub and the wave ski and had a lovely time taking turns out on the bay. As Elf said later, thank heavens for all the little crabs, or the kids on the beach would have had nothing to do except find oysters to cut themselves on. The Huon Valley is very fetching (mud notwithstanding) and 100 metres out from shore riding a very slight swell, is a terrific position from which to appreciate it. (Note how I'm talking all nautical now, avast).

The girls (very proficient swimmers) wanted to try the wave ski on their own, so we let them have a paddle close to shore. This inspired Marcus to do the same - he handled it very well and I felt very proud of him, scooting around out there. I also took the Tub for a row on my own, which I think is a first - it handles beautifully when you're the only one in it. Well, except for a persistent swerve to port, due to a damaged starboard oar. Michael hopped in for a tour of the bay with me before we packed up.

On the way home Michael had a lot of questions about sea levels. "If the sea levels rise, then all the maps will be wrong!" He is also a bit obsessed with the dotted lines on maps, where boundaries are In Dispute Or Undefined. To Michael, these are "battles", eg India and China are "battling" in the Sinkiang region. He has predicted that with the sea level rising there will be more battles - I think he is imagining a wholesale wobbling and rearranging of all the borders and coastlines. I suppose in the long view he is right. I think Geoffrey Blainey said "no political boundary can ever be permanent".

Meanwhile Marcus is demanding to know where he can see oxygen as a solid.

WW1 dazzle ships

From an exhibition at Rhode Island School of Design (documented here).

The father of camouflage, Abbott Thayer described animal coloration as a way to conceal or disrupt an object. Dazzle is disruptive (think of a zebra). French artists developed military camouflage in World War I. Ships were hard to camouflage against U-boats because the sea and sky were always changing and of the smoke they produced. Norman Wilkinson, a marine painter who was in the Royal Navy, is credited with being the first to develop dazzle camouflage for ships. The Royal Navy allowed him to test his idea. When the test went well Wilkinson was told to proceed, however, he was given no office space. So he went to his alma mater the Royal Academy and was given a classroom. Wilkinson hired Vorticist Edward Wadsworth to be a port officer in Liverpool, England and oversee the painting of dazzle ships. In 1918, Wilkinson came to United States to share his dazzle plans. 1,000 plans were developed through this partnership.