Livin' La Vida Local

Summer, Aussie style, is coming to an end y'all, and I'm just gonna have to accept it. Things in the shop have been slowing down for weeks - post-Christmas rush is over, schools are back in session, people aren't thinking to spend tons of money on dive gear at the moment. So shifts are being cut back and I've got more free time on my hands. This last week I thought about taking a road trip because I was only rostered for one shift on Saturday, but I gave it some thought and decided I'd rather stick to the area and do some local touristing instead!

First up: Maritime Museum in Fremantle. The second Tuesday of every month they do donation admission pricing, so what better time to go and get some local touristing on the cheap!? The museum was so, so neat. Filled with cool sailboats, including the Australia II which won the America's Cup race back in 1983 and put Fremantle on the international map, the whole place pays homage to the local maritime history: sailing, fishing, military, pearling, conservation, you name it. I spent a great long while learning about the Italian immigrants that broke up the fish market monopoly in Freo (Freo = Fremantle) back in the 1930s, and ushered in a sustainable fishing economy there, and about the pearling economy in Shark Bay in WA and up north in Broome - two of the largest pearling stations in the world.

Learned about Jon Sanders, the first person to complete a triple circumnavigation of the globe. He has since gone on to complete 7 more circumnavigations (as recently as 2018) with plans for an 11th now that he's 80 years old! There's a great article about him deciding to do an 11th trip that includes this amazing explanation of why he's going to go ahead with an 11th attempt after saying he was done after 10: “I’m back here, I’m bored, I know I can do it, I know how to do it, I’ve got nothing else to do. What’ll I do, stay home? Just because I said it?” Again, he's 80. What a boss. 

The boat Jon Sanders completed his triple circumnavigation in 

Loved learning about the general hoopla surrounding the 1983 America's Cup that marked the first time, in 132 years of the race's existence, that the New York Yacht Club lost the race. The Australia II won and popularized the image of the fighting kangaroo in the process (they needed a flag and the main competition was using one with a bulldog smoking a cigar).

First time the America's Cup left America

1983 America's Cup jacket

The punching kangaroos became the iconic emblem of the victory 

 The museum also has a megamouth shark specimen! They're super rare (or at least super rarely seen by humans), and this one beached itself locally in the late '80s. This one was only the third ever found and recorded (only 50 specimens have been collected to date), so when it was beaching itself, onlookers apparently didn't even know it was a shark - they thought it was a whale. It's got rows and rows of gnarly teeth, but they actually eat plankton. Super neat.

Megamouth shark

Aussie military submarine

Boats everywhere

My other big adventure outing for the week was to the Cohunu Koala Park!

It's basically a petting zoo, but if you pay extra and use some hand sanitizer, they let you hold a koala and feed him. Obviously I did that.

Freshie

It was VERY HOT, so this dude was just like "please feed me popcorn but don't make me move for it" and obviously I obliged.

Ostrich

Red Kangaroo

Emu

Broski just really wanted his head scratched

Emu on the loose

They also had dinosaur statues scattered about because why not?

Albie and me

Friends forever because I fed him

 

He had a kinda Yoda vibe going on

Albie was very interested in eating the eucalyptus and generally just chilling. Again, it was VERY HOT (the high for the day was 41 C, so 105.8 F), so he wanted to snack and then go back to napping (koalas nap 20-23 hours per day because the eucalyptus apparently has very little nutritional value and it's easier to just sleep all the time than to find a better food source). He felt a little wooly, like a sheep, and I mostly just feel phenomenally lucky to have gotten to held this little critter when so many of his compatriots in the wild aren't doing so hot with all the bushfires. Which, update, are finally contained! They've had torrential flooding the past two weeks (which brings about its own problems, clearly), so a bunch of the fires are extinguished and those that are still burning are at least contained by firefighters. YAY!

Anyway, those were my two big excursions this week. I didn't do any diving, worked very little (though I did end up getting a second shift when my co-worker called out sick), but I got to cuddle a koala. Win.

3 days off in a row: Part 2

So the last three day adventure was all about the diving. It took me for a local dive with my friend/co-worker, Wes, down south to Dunsborough/Busselton to dive the Busselton Jetty with my friend Grant, and out to Rottnest Island on the shop boat to dive with Nat!

Wes and I kicked things off with a dive at the Kwinana Grain Terminal, maybe a 35 minute drive from my house. We aren't the best of planners, Wes and me, but we managed to agree on a time and a place and we were going diving so who cared if we were scrambling a little bit in the morning to get ready?! It wasn't an issue until we were fully kitted up and only then noticed that Wes was missing a fairly critical piece of gear: his mask. Oops. So rather than throw in the towel, we tossed our gear in the trunk (I can FEEL my Aussie friends rolling their eyes and saying, "It's called a BOOT!"), and raced off to his house to grab it. So glad we did because we did a sweet 90 minute dive and I discovered that Wes is an ideal dive buddy because he's just as much of a slow poke as me! We scooted along and snapped photos and generally just loved being under water. Day 1 of time off was off to a most auspicious start!

After the KGT dive, I headed off to Grant's house to make our way southward. Plan was to stay at his Dad's house in Dunsborough, dive the Busselton Jetty in the morning, and then make our way back home to Perth. Solid plan. I was only about 1.5 hours later meeting Grant than he had anticipated but, bless him, he didn't complain a bit. Instead he equipped me with road sodas and away we went.

Road Sodas for me

Road snacks

Grant knows how to do a road trip. He not only packed me an esky of road sodas (Aussies call coolers eskys ["ESS-keys"]. It's a brand of cooler, but they use it universally. Think Xerox or BandAid. Kiwis, fun fact, call them chilly bins!), but also packed cheese & crackers! When I teased him for including a cutting board and cheese knife, he very confusedly asked how I had planned to cut the cheese without them. So practical. I have also learned this is the way I prefer to eat Vegemite - as a cracker seasoning. Not a fan of it on toast for brekkie.

So we had this lovely drive down south to relive all the songs we loved in high school, got to his Dad's house pretty late (but not too late to have a beer with him, because, #hospitality) and fought exhaustion and opted to walk the 200m down the road to check out the late night beach stars. Worth it! Dunsborough is a little beach town, not a big city, so there was really limited light pollution (just street lamps and car traffic for the most part) and it was BEAUTIFUL. Seeing Orion's Belt and the Southern Cross up in the sky, against the backdrop of the Milky Way, is stunning. Being able to see the Milky Way while in the midst of civilization and not out in the bush somewhere was amazing.

Next morning we rallied to get ourselves out to the jetty for an early start to the dive and it was SO beautiful! Grant brought along a big wheeled wagon to haul our gear out, so life was wayyy easier than it might have been. When Wiebke and I visited Busso weeks before, I saw some people walking their scuba gear out already assembled and just on their backs. Wagon was definitely the superior method of transport. We slow rolled ourselves out, got set up in the shade of the entrance platform, and got to it.

Part of the reason the jetty is so nice to dive is because there's an underwater marine observation platform that gives good reason to cultivate nice aquatic life on the wooden pilings. Divers are asked (by lots of signage) to remain 10m away from the viewing windows, probably so we don't scare off any critters that the dry folks inside are watching, but it's pretty satisfying to be able to chase off after the cool stuff that's out of their line of sight!

This little box fish was VERY curious and visited with me for a solid 5-10 minutes. I'm not sure if she saw her reflection in my mask or what, but she was alllll up in my face and hair.  

Look at that faaaaceeeee!

Grant with the Old Wives

So much color!

Piling growth

Old Wives

I have to give GoPro credit - the thing makes it easy to take underwater photos and videos. But the inability to change the view settings when it's in an underwater housing makes it impossible to swap between wide views like these ^^ and close up views of small critters like nudibranchs that really call for more detail than a wide view setting will give. Ah, the challenges of being a noob underwater photographer!

Next day was an early one - you've got to be at the Quay at 7:45 for an 8am departure - so we headed home right after scarfing some burgers. Nat and Dom went for crays, so I ended up pairing up with a guy I met on the boat that day and we got to scope out some pretty neat swim throughs in the limestone that forms much of the reef around Rottnest. I took some photos, but my brain is getting foggy and, as Mom reminded me a few hours ago, I really ought to post again. Love to my peeps!