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Tuesday 27 March 2007

Drunken Maths


IC+BR+CC+SM*GFD=F ???

Now here is a good one for all you budding naval architects or 'obsessed with numbers' sort of person. What do you get when you cross a bottle of Inner Circle, Bundy, Canadian Club and Small Batch Beam with...



The leftovers from the cooking earlier in the day?



equals = FREAK!!! :)



Oh and for all you concerned with our safety, they werent new bottles and we didnt drink them all. :)

Monday 26 March 2007

Dam(n)?!

After some pie to get us revitalised we headed off for a quick bushwalk out past the dam to a spot Dave was telling us about. The dam here is a concrete gravity dam thats 33 metres high. Mighty impressive when you get up close, not that we did. You have to walk up from the river because the dam is all locked up and out of bounds. So after a bit of a stroll...

A panoramic of the lower section of the dam.



Looking up from the bottom... The people up there are so small when your down the river.



The feeling of being near that much water is crazy. It has a presence about it. It freaked me out anyway.



When it really rains hard the cascading water over the lip of the dam looks amazing. Fortunately not much rain here recently so its dry as a bone.



The walk around the back of the dam lead us through some really cool dark mossy areas. The phot hardly shows the gloom. Its almost rainforest-like.



Looking at the dam from across the water. If you look closely you can just see the Kombi.

Belated St Patties = Pie Pie Pie

Mmm well i needed an excuse to cook up some Steak and Guiness pie and since I missed St Patties last weekend I thought i'd do it all again the next weekend.
Here they are, fresh out of the oven. mmmm...


Beautiful cake from Breyley. Love the Irish theme.


Happy Campers

An especially happy camper...



Phil, Ash and Junior


Benny twitching, strong coffee?


Phil and Ash doing what Phil and Ash do...



Why so evil Breyley? Oh thats right your protecting the cake from Matt...

Friday 23 March 2007

Flight back to Launnie

Just a few quick piccies out the window on the flight back to Tassie. I wish I was on the other side of the plane, they had an awesome sunset above the clouds. Oh well next time perhaps.



Cant really see it in the photo but this looked like a mini Aurora Australis happening. Now that would have been cool to see. Not far enough south for that though.



75th Anniversary Sydney Harbour Bridge Walk

Well Andrew, me and the little man headed out to walk across the bridge for its 75th birthday. We headed out early due to reports that the amount of people walking across would be staggering and probably too much to take the little man along safely. In actual fact it was quite empty when we got there and things moved very quickly. There were no lines at all. We all walked straight up, recieved our free gross coloured hat and walked straight on. Actually the site of all those green heads was pretty cool in the end.

Andrew, Will and I at the beginning...



The Morelli's enjoying the view.



"Yes Will, more helicopters. But look at the cool bridge..."



All those green headed freaks...



75 and still going strong. You dont really get to see the scope and size of the bridge until you get right under it. Much prettier than these new concrete spans.

Wednesday 21 March 2007

Sophie Morelli has Arrived!!!

Well here she is, all 6 pounds something of beautiful baby. Seen here for the first time in her little crib at the hospital. She is treating everyone perfectly getting solid 4 hour sleeps in at a time only waking when she's hungry. Much the same as most uni students too!



She looks so tiny when you pick her up. I'm always as nervous as hell due to her being so frail.



More drinking... do you remember when your dinners were 60ml?



Will seems to already have a very special bond with her. He loves to sit next to her.



But when he gets tired of that its always back to having fun. Its great to see how active he is. I've managed to get 'dog' out of him and if you ask where is the dog he'll turn and point to Nell or Roxy.

Tuesday 13 March 2007

Benny bought a Kombi

Yes thats right. Ben saw this little beauty sitting on the side of the road proudly displaying a 'For Sale' sign. From then on it was a done deal. He wouldn't shut up about the thing all day and sure enough, the day after Liffey Falls he was trying to get the parts Volvo high up into the back yeard to make room in the garage for the new project.

The new beast. You could slice a cow in one go with that bullbar.







Wearing the badge proud. Just in dire need of some polish.



Love marks, hickeys for cars perhaps?



Plenty of space inside with room for 8 (easy). Benny can hardle control his excitement.



First cruise. Did the lap around Mowbray to show them what a real car is.



Congrats dude, I hear its more than a car, its a lifestyle. The bongo drum players will be green with envy.

Safe Astoria

We headed out to Beauty Point to day for a tour of the 'Safe Astoria', A Dutch owned semi submersible exploration platform that has been converted to an accomodation and support platform for larger production platforms.

Here is the underside of the platform. The pontoons are flooded with water and the whole rig lowered by a depth of about 15metres when it is on station. To give you an idea of size the distance between water level and the underside of the platform in this picture is about 80 feet. Then there are about 5 stories on the platform plus cranes and utilities. The timber bollards you see here are designed to stop ships damaging the legs.



The view from the pontoon up to the 'spider deck'.



Taken from the recreation deck outside the galley. You can see the helideck two stories above. There was a fantastic view of the Tamar River.



The view from the helideck. Bell Bay is in the background and the dust from the loading of the woodchips to be sold to Japan for paper. The wire around the outside of the helipad is the locator beacon for the choppers to land in bad visibility and to find the rig at sea.



The "I" deck. :)



The anchor cables. There is something like 1300 metres of cable here. The anchors are towed out, posistioned and then sunk. Tension is then pulled quite strongly on them to ensure that the rig is in the correct posistion and stays there.



The anchors. They differ in design to normal ships anchors as they are designed to go subterranean. Often burying themselves up to 15metres below the seabed as tension iss pulled onto them. Normal anchors rely on the weight of the chain to hold them in place whereas these rely soley on the anchor themselves.

Liffey Falls

Well here are the photos of Liffey Falls. Because of the amount of photos i've split it into two sections; fun and arty. Fun photos are of us, arty ones are of the falls.

Enjoy!

Arty Stuff

Ok everyone, as promised here comes the arty photos from the trip to Liffey Falls. I'm really impressed considering this was the first real chance i've had to do some cool water flow, slow exposure shots. I apologise for the grey crosses across most of the photos. I'm considering using the photos for stock and I dont want the copyright infringed.

If you have any thoughts on how I could improve any of these let me know. Constructive critisicm is always welcome. None of the photos have been edited in any way yet.

One from Azza. Stoked how well he got this out of a point and shoot and no tripod.



The peaceful little waterhole where the group photo was taken. It took Benny's feet hours to thaw from this place.



Sorry no post processing yet, I think I might be able to get a good widescreen on this one by trimming the crap off the top.



Not bad. An early one, still getting things right.



I love this one. I wonder how it would look on canvas. There is a slightly wider ang version of this one too that might work even better.



The cascade of Liffey Falls...



Smoooooth...



I almost want to jump in... Only thing stopping me is the broken pool heater.



Zen...






Taken from under Liffey



A few little trickles make an awesome piccy.



Beautiful pic Benny, summed the place up just right.