Feel the Burn Baby!!!

Time to test out for real how good I am at fire twirling. Has all the practice with the old converted broken broom handle paid off?

Starting off with some simple rotors. I was a bit nervous... I was suprised at first how much heat came off the ends when they weren't spinning.






Figure'o'8... Feeling much more confident here... Gods its cool fun...



Phill giving it a go with a bit of the 8 action...



Ash having a crack at it. Awesome effort Ash! you were a natural!!



Dave was so stoked he let me keep a photo for the blog! :D



Getting overconfident is a bit of a shock when it goes wrong. Lucky it burns quite cool so no burns. Mind you its warm enough that i'm missing half the hair on one arm.

Cyclops smiley face!!!



Here is a few shots from the end of the night when I was getting used to it and improving rapidly...



Love this one... :)



And to top it off at the very end of the night I pulled off an awesome throw and catch!!!



Well all the clothes are in the wash because my shorts are black from the mess ups and they stink of Kero...

Sooooo much fun was had tonight! :) Ciao!!!

Crater Cove

If you head down the hill from Dobroyd Head, down the bush track and take a semi-concealed right turn down a dark and narrow secret track, you will emerge at Crater Cove. Locals might remember this area as the area where a lot of hermits used to live. They have been evicted since the old days and now the huts and shacks are protected and maintained by volunteers from the NSW Sparks and Wildfire services.

Here's the cove with Dobroyd being the big headland on the right of the picture. You can just make out some of the shacks in the distance. They are remarkably well camouflaged.



Entrance sign all painted up in true hippy style.



The view from one of the shacks. With this to wakeup to every morning, its not great wonder why these people lived here for so long.



One of the "bigger" shacks. They were all still pretty tiny, built from salvaged driftwood and anything else that could be carried in.



This shack was so cool, it overhung a sandstone cave below it and had a rainwater collection system that drained all the water into a keg with a tap at the bottom. Seriously cool design and implementation.



Another entrance sign. The sign on the right says a lot of things but emphasises the point of "For gods sake, dont ask us if we live here, we've heard it a thousand times and it's just plain rude now."



One of the many little sandstone cave/grottos. You could spend hours here just relaxing.



The bottom end of the freshwater supply system...



More aquaducts for transporting water around.



Crater Cove mass transit system. Probably more reliable than Sydney's rail system too.



I shall be returning that way again soon too. This time i'll take a good book with me and sit down and enjoy the view for a few hours.

Tuff Trip - Blue Mountains - Panoramic

Hi all...

Here is the last piccie for the trip, a sewn together panoramic taken at the end of the day when everyone was about to head home. You'll probably have to click on it to get a bigger view.



Enjoy

Tuff Trip - Blue Mountains - Part 1

On Saturday we packed the cars and headed up to the blue mountains to test our skills by throwing the cars up a range of muddy, wet, slippery and rocky tracks designed to sort the men from the boys...

Andy, Tristan and Al ready to depart...



Daisy where it always is, behind.... :)



The only good way to keep warm in the Blue Mountains in the middle of winter is to burn half the state forest that your camping in... This little puppy was hot enough to make short work of any bottles thrown into it. What survived the next day was some cool bottle art...



A hot breakfast on a bloody cold morning the next day. I never thought I could appreciate bacon and eggs with a hot coffee more than I did that morning. Tristan wouldn't stop carrying on about the coffee. One would think he has never had the real stuff before...



The sight of the cold as hell diesels starting up was near on comical. Al's Maverick churns out heaps at the best of times let alone this morning when the whole campsite was covered in a fossil fuel fog...



Stay tuned for part 2 with the driving bits...

Tuff Trip - Blue Mountains - Part 2

Day two of the Tuff Trip saw the congregation meet at the Railway Station for the ZigZag Railway. After meeting and greeting everyone we headed back into the bush to have a crack at several different tracks. Since the conditions were less than ideal the almighty group leader decided to head straight for Matt's Track with the idea that it should be so bad that we would be stuck there all day.

As you can see, some were more keen than others to get straight into the harder stuff... Ross was carrying around half of the mountain on his tray for a few hours after this...



Take 2...



All you need is V8 power ...



Andy testing out his new shoes... There are 33 inch Simex's under there somewhere...



V8 power to the rescue again...



Pete's Patrol giving it a go. Pretty much everyone got a snatch up this section...



The Defender's in action. Sorry I forgot who went in what car...



Al's Maverick giving it it's all, Diesel smoke included...



Another crack at the tougher section, Note the rock slab behind that Ross does in the Bush Ranger...



More Photo's in part 3 coming up. (I do it in smaller sections to speed load times.)

Tuff Trip - Blue Mountains - Part 3

Back to it then.

Here is Ross hitting up that rock slab I told you about in part 2. In fact I actually missed him going up it but here he is reversing back down it to have some more fun on the other parts.



Pete's Patrol heading down Matts Track. Awesome fun to watch.



Getting some serious angles at the bottom of Matt's Track.



Smile like you aren't worried something is about to break!



Another concerned pose...



See Al? Nothing to worry about, the Maverick eats it all up. As for listening to Andy's directions, well, thats a bit silly.



Aww... All broken, lucky the beers were on hand. Any ideas what snapped dude?



Cheers for the great weekend everyone, I might have one more photo to add up in a bit. If they're crap quality its because I left photoshop in Tasmania.

Cheerio!

Pasha Bulker at Nobby's Beach

We drove up the coast to see the now infamous Pasha Bulker at Nobby's Beach in Newcastle. Apparently this was become the biggest tourism attraction in Newcastle at the time. It was refloated off the beach last night and towed out to sea. Apparently this was also the first nice weather day that other people could go and see the spectacle as there were literally thousands of people lining the beach which was closed off obviously to prevent people climbing all over the vessel...

The ship was refloated last night with several holes in its sides, the rudder has broken off, the propellor is screwed (pardon the pun), the prop tube is obviously rooted as its leaking oil and there are several big creases down the side of the vessel. It will be interesting to see if it is junked or repaired...

New rule for me, panoramics dont work with a polariser filter on...



Here she is in all her grounded glory. I dont know if the anchors were even deployed to stop the beaching or not. There is some serious chafing on the bulb to suggest that they were out but how they got them back in is a mystery, especially if the vessel had run over its own chains. If the anchors weren't deployed the captain should be beaten with the ugly stick. Not that he shouldn't be already...



The swell was pretty reasonable on the day we went up there, not huge but decent. The noise that came out of the rear of the vessel as the waves thumped into it was so cool. Sounded like artillery shells in the distance...



More big hits...



Nobby's Beach with a big front coming through. Further rain and Storms were forecast that day...



The view from the beach before some rent-a-cop shmuck chased me away from my vantage point. Must be a satisfying career protecting a beach from the gaze of evil spectators...



While we were there the helicopters were constantly dropping crates off and picking other stuff off. One would presume it was dropping of salvage supplies and picking up fuel oil...





More stress on the structure...



The weather front rolling in behind...



Heaps of other coal vessels out at sea about to get hit by the bad weather. Hopefully the captains on these boats have a little more sense than the Pasha's Skip...



The usual suspects...



Al gives his disapproval...



All the others...