How could I not write up our wild weekend. Sunday was always predicted to be an entertaining day, which started with me being woken up at 2am by the gale force gusts buffeting overhead. The winds didn’t stop till late into Saturday night reaching near Category 2 cyclone strength. This broke the previous record of wind speeds for May, maxing at 135km/hr. It was an impressive front that hit some 900km of coastline. Tearing the place up and knocking out power for some 160,000 people, included us. The biggest storm in 49 years:
The above image and below video is our beach at 8am. The gusts nearly blowing me off my feet and assisting in producing a swell with waves reaching all the way to the dunes. There is usually 40m of beach between the dunes and waterline. I went down several times during Sunday and the water stayed high all day. On Tuesday after the wind and swell had subsided we would be lucky to have 20m of beach left to the waterline. But it was not just the beach that got battered. Trees were bowled over, and a few homes had roofs ripped off:
Monday morning came and things settled down, so I went out for my usual walk along Peppy Beach. Intending to use an image of trees that had been felled, laying part way across the roads. However, this Quenda or Southern Brown Bandicoot (Isoodon obesulus subsp. fusciventer) is far more interesting so won out. A record breaker in its own right. It earns the title of having the shortest gestation period of any mammal, at 11 to 15 days. Once born the joey makes its way into the pouch, which is reversed compared to most other marsupials:
This is to avoid the pouch being filled with dirt, as the Quenda is a digging marsupial. These small rabbit sized creatures do not burrow but dig to forage. They can dig nearly 4 metric tons of dirt in a single year while searching for food. Walking back along what was left of the beach, last night’s rare blue micromoon hung in the sky. Call a blue moon as it is the second full moon in a single calendar month, and micro as it has occurred while the moon is the furthest it orbits away from earth. A combination we won’t see for another 27 years:
The contrast from Sunday to Monday was quite amazing, calm blue skies came over. And as Monday was a public holiday this opened a window of opportunity. I went fishing. Howsie took the bait, which resulted in us heading up the hill to Welly Dam for an afternoon climb. While the lawns were littered with branches and a few of the smaller trees had been uprooted from yesterday’s wind and wet weather, today’s dry and sunny conditions worked it’s magic in our favour and most lines were in great condition:
Good enough for Howsie to beat one of his nemesis climbs, and get a clean ascent. And also good enough for me to brave an attempt on one of the routes I decided was a bit too silly on the misty moisty Saturday morning, when I came up here on a solo mission. It was not to be a clean ascent for me, taking a healthy whipper at the crux much to the amusement of a small crowd that was observing our antics. Most of our time we had the place to ourselves, and after the continuous ear battering wind of yesterday the silence today was almost deafening:
Sandbagged 