The moon and stars

One of my favourite lines from any film is ‘keep to the road, stay clear of the moors, and beware of the full moon’.  And in case you are not aware of the flick, it comes from the early 80s classic ‘An American Werewolf in London’.  This came out a couple of years before Michael Jackson’s epic video for his hit ‘Thriller’.  The special effects won Rick Baker the first ever first-ever Academy Award for Best Makeup.  Being for the werewolf transformation scene, which used new and original special effects, with no computer-generated imagery:

Last weekend Lisa and I hoped for a bit of a transformation.  Not one quite as monstrous.  Simply getting away for a few nights, taking advantage of the long weekend, to relax.  Deciding a bit late in the day to go away and being a long weekend, our options for finding somewhere available were limited.  Ending up in Pemberton, where on the first day as per previous visits here, it rained.  The second day cleared up but we only squeezed in one short walk close to town.  The rest of the time we spent eating, playing games, and chilling out:

As such there are only a few images from our wonderful mini-break.  The place where we stayed, all lit up at night.  Above the moon tipping over the towering Karri trees, which help make this general area so special and soothing.  And below Lisa and me in a rare selfie image, after having soaked up a heap of relaxing energy.  Transformation complete, we headed home on Monday.  It was the moons turn to transform on Tuesday night, into a Blood Moon.  A fancy word for a total lunar eclipse that occurs when the sun, earth, and moon line up:

As the earth is sandwiched between them, it blocks out the direct sunlight that usually reflects off the moon.  The eerie colour of the moon that results is caused by Rayleigh scattering.  The light from the sun passes through the earth’s atmosphere, in which the oxygen and nitrogen particles scatter the blue light.  Only the yellow and red light make it through, and this is then reflected off the moon.  Yellow and red make up orange, and during the whole event the moon can look red, rusty orange, or a deep crimson:

I make no apology for the above fuzzy image.  Being the best I could manage with my hand held phone on night setting for a shaky long exposure.  This spectacle occurs approx. every three years and the whole process takes close to an hour.  The last time it occurred we had cloudy skies, so missed out.  This time round we were in for a real treat as, with a cloudless night sky.  Fast forward to Thursday, when I joined Lisa and the pooches for her morning beach walk.  And as may be evident the water wasn’t looking great.  Again:

My friend Verity, in Perth, recently sent an update on her underwater adventures.  Weaving a few stats into her exploits, and advising she has managed an average of 2.5 snorkels/week over nearly three months.  Way more than me.  I can probably count the number of times I’ve been in the water on my fingers, and not including my thumbs would still have spare digits.  I could of course have driven to coastal areas with bed sediments not as affected by the higher swells.  Verity has even suggested I could head up to her local spots, and they do look good:

They are however a solid two hours and 190km away.  One day I really should head up there, as the different marine life does look very cool.  That said and in keeping with the t-shirt I am wearing in the selfie, I generally reserve car trips of that length, and much shorter, for my adventures on rock.  This occurred on Friday, with yet another quick session up at Welly Dam.  Another before work trip with my partner in climb, Howsie.  Here once more the moon added that extra little something to images of this place that would otherwise all meld into one:

These sessions are short and sharp, and we kinda view them as training.  Time on rock is what we are after.  So not picking climbs so hard that we waste time working one or two moves, but push things just enough to wear ourselves out.  If we get it right, which we did this time, later that day we start to get a satisfying achy feeling.  This ache, also known as Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), comes from microscopic tears in muscle fibres.  As such when it occurs, time off and rest is what the body needs before returning to said activity:

Added to that, the need to be careful of my repairing tendons would suggest I should have made use of the weekend to allow for ‘time and rest’.  However, I liked the idea of a climb by the ocean and put out a call for a relaxed climb on Saturday.  I got no bites, maybe another sign to rest up.  The pull was however too strong, and this saw me watch first light come in at Wilyabrup.  The moon was, once more, adding to the imagery from this past week of mostly outdoor fun.  I didn’t expect to see any werewolf’s, but a dolphin would have been nice:

While I cleaned up on the Dolphin Smiles wall and ended with Hope, references only local climber’s will understand, I saw no dolphins.  That was despite the perfect sets of waves for them to surf in on, which were rolling in all morning.  These can be seen above as I walked out, which is the last image with the moon in it.  In contrast the ocean in our local bay was looking relatively calm and clear.  Much better than it has been for most of this snorkelling season.  And with the added encouragement of seeing Verity’s images, I went in for a dip:

Despite being quiet and seeing very few fish, it was a lovely cool temperature after the hot time on rock.  The two stars of the shows were a wonderful bait ball of juvenile Striped Eel Catfish (Plotosus lineatus), and a Southern Eagle Ray (Myliobatis australis) that was mostly buried in the sand when I spotted it.  Until I endeavoured to get a rare, for me, front on image.  Not taking too kindly to my intrusion it rose out of the sand, spun round, and disappeared.  Back at the beach just as I got out, a pod of dolphins cruised by.  Bliss: