You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March, 2009.
To finish off a very busy weekend we jumped in the car and headed for the beach. Stopping briefly for hot take away chips at The Kiosk we were soon sitting on the grassy bank at our favourite little beach tucking into some dinner. I’d been busy most of the day setting plasterboards after we’d recovered from a rare night out at a 40th birthday party. (Still on the 40’s, not quite into the 50ths yet!). It was rare in that there were no kids there but it could equally have been rare ‘coz we never go much for nights out! So we’d walked all the kids up to the famous golden arches restaurant for breakfast and then Ted and I managed a quick look round the local hot rod swap meet. There’s always more grey hairs than any other colour, assuming these guys still have hair and some of the creations just make me cringe that anybody would actually still drive something from the LSD-fuelled George Barris car collection on the public street. Still it takes Allsorts to make a bag…
Back to the beach and the hour had reached that part of the day where the sun had dropped below the escarpment sinking the east-facing beach into shade. The whole place was then bathed in the strangest of orange glows, like a soft electric light bulb that someone’s left on in the back room.
After the chips, we played on the cooling sand and paddled in the shallows. Archie went nuts for the open space and salty sand as ever. The dark weed-like shapes we’d spotted swimming around the wave line turned out to be the critters we’d hoped for and the largest black stingray came round into the beach to pass just a few metres from where I stood. Then it stopped and busied itself foraging in the sand , presumably for its own dinner; molluscs, shellfish and any other morsels it came across. It was a fair sized specimen, probably a metre and a half across the wing tips and the same length to the tip of its heavily barbed tail. The thick body was by now quite well out of the water and as it flapped around the mottled white undersides of its wings were easy to see. Its jet-black body glistened like a well-used leather bag in the twilight. Knowing it wouldn’t beach itself I stood as long as I could and only wish I’d had a facemask and snorkel to have come closer to this marvelous creature. And so with a few flicks of its wingtips and some deft manoeuvering of its tail it soon headed into deeper water only to come back round on another pass a little later on.
Back on the sand the kids chattered wildly about the stingray in Disney’s ‘Finding Nemo’ and after Sydney’s recent spate of shark sightings and attacks, I’m only pleased they haven’t been brain-washed about going into the sea.
As the soft twilight faded fast, Lottie and Scarlett hurried me over to the rock pools to search for any stay out late crabs and starfish. It wasn’t long though before the girls conceded that even the crabs had called it a day and scurried off to bed.
With Monday morning rushing round faster than ever we stood a while watching the fabulous lightning bolts tens if not hundreds of miles out to sea, first flickering a glow across the thick grey cloud banks, then zapping down to the horizon joining heaven and ocean like a massive Van der Graaf generator. The sound never reached us for the storms were so far away. Then while looking over this simply enormous view out towards the earth’s most vast ocean, like a bolt from the sky it struck me; oh beautiful world, why we really are so very small.
