Stingray, no sign of Troy Tempest

Sunday 30th March 2008
After all the wine last night we decided to have a lie in this morning, fortunately daylight saving finished today so we gained an extra hour in bed, the kids didn’t, they just got up an hour earlier and watched a film that Marisa has bought.
We are now into autumn and it’s time to get out the woollies, the weather today was only about 31 degrees centigrade today and we still had to wear sunscreen, according to the weather forecasters the temperatures are due to take a big dip this week with the possibility of it going down to as low as 23 degrees and the chance of some rain and thunder.
The locals are already starting to go about in trousers instead of shorts and are wearing fleeces, they are however still wearing their Thongs (flip flops) so we are assuming that when they start wearing shoes winter will be upon us and we can turn off the air conditioning.
We dropped the kids off at the park while we did a bit of shopping and checked out the opposition just in case we ever decide to do Sunday Breakfasts. After about an hour we picked up the kids and went home for lunch, watched a bit of Aussie Football and chilled out until it was time to go to the beach again.
This time we went to Bunker Bay, it is about 30 minutes from us and it was absolutely gorgeous, it is very sheltered with a soft sandy beach and lovely warm water. Unfortunately our swim was curtailed by the arrival on the scene of a rather large Stingray, Carolyn had seen something dark moving in the water about 4-5 feet away but thought that it was a large clump of seaweed being carried along in the current. The people about 30 feet further along the beach from us who obviously know what to look out for in the water had seen it swimming past us but didn’t say anything because the didn’t want to startle us and possibly make things worse.
They did however get out of the water themselves because it was swimming their way and they told some other people further along who were in its line as it swam in the shallows feeding, when we noticed that there was nobody in the water apart from us and everyone was looking at the water and pointing we thought it might be prudent to get out and find out what was happening.
We asked the people closest to us what was happening and they told us that they had seen the Stingray swimming along the shallows and pointed it out to us, we followed it up the beach and it was coming in really close to the waters edge, it was a big one with a wing span of about 5 feet. Apparently you don’t normally see them that large so close to the shore.
We walked back down the beach to our bags and decided not to go back in the water today although the kids weren’t worried and carried on playing in the water, we decided that we would just keep an eye out for the Stingray just in case it or another one decided to come along, after about 10 minutes of watching the Stingray came back again going back along the shore in the opposite direction. Apparently they will avoid contact and if you splash around a bit they will swim off, but this one was a bit to big to be testing out theories on.
We had Lamb Chops for tea and put the kids to bed early ready for school again tomorrow. We did a bit of swotting in the evening because we have got a meeting with the letting agent of the Café tomorrow and we want to make sure we know what we are talking about and make a good impression.
Almost forgot, while we were out this morning we popped into the local Video store and that is what it was. This store is big for a video rental outlet and you wouldn’t believe how many videos they have in there to rent, while the rest of the world embraced DVD’s and are getting ready to do the same with Blue Ray, Busseltons video rental store is jam packed with video. They do have DVD’s, just not as many of them and the latest releases are the same films that we watched on DVD when we were still in the UK 5 months ago. We’ve been here for just over 2 months now so in theory, for us any films released here in 3 months time will be new releases and we won’t be able to criticise anymore, although we will have to go out and buy a Video Player, although at least we only have to buy a VHS one because they’ve stopped using Betamax now.