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OK, no saving the best for last today, I’m jumping right into the whales! Last weekend our friend Melbourne Rob took us out on his boat. Here is Hugh eagerly awaiting our departure from the Rosslyn Bay marina:

(As an aside, the hill you can see in the backround apparently has those hexagonal rocks like you can see at the Giant’s Causeway in northern Ireland – will have to head over there one of these days to investigate!)

We first anchored off Great Keppel Island, with its beautiful turquoise water:

We then donned our snorkel gear and swam over to the caves you can see in the photo above:

The photo above was taken with my new underwater camera gear – obviously not underwater at this point, but takes pretty good photos! And I have a neck mount that I attach it to so I can be hands free while snorkeling. Unfortunately, nothing to see underwater at this stop, just crystal clear waters.

We then went over to Humpy Island:

There’s a beautiful sandy point there. All the white things you see on the sand are pieces of washed up coral (took a couple home to add to our collection of beach debris on the lazy susan on our dining table :)):

Took this video to show the view from the sandy point on Humpty Island:

 

After a bite to eat on the boat, we decided to see if we could find any whales. June-November is whale migration season for the humpbacks of Antarctica. They head north June-August and back south to Antarctica September-November. Hervey Bay, about 4 hours south of here, is the ideal whale watching place (apparently at the height of migration/mating/having babies season, there are 30,000 whales in the area!), but we’re seeing quite a few around the Keppel Islands too. Lyn and Rob had seen them a couple times so Rob took us out to one of the spots in the hopes we might see them too. It wasn’t looking promising at first. We did see a dolphin, so that was good. But we were starting to give up hope on whales – until we got to this magical spot near Pumpkin Island:

A momma and her calf were playing away in the water! I took a bunch of videos and have trimmed them down to the key parts for you, but I apologise in advance that it still looks a bit like the Blair Witch Project – it was rather wavy on the ocean :). In no particular order, here are the whale videos:

 

 

 

 

 

The baby was very good at flipping his tail up and down. The mama was very good at showing off her fins and doing full breaches out of the water. Absolutely incredible and right in our backyard!

We then headed toward Svendsen’s Beach on Great Keppel, where a big turtle swam by. We had another bite to eat on the boat and then headed back home. An absolutely amazing day – big thank you to Melbourne Rob!

Our friends Karen and John were out boating the week before and saw whales too, but their primary purpose was fishing. Check out the amazing fish they caught:

The front one is a Lilac Parrot Fish, the middle one is a Coral Trout, and the last one is an estuary cod/orange spotted cod – all very delicious fish!

I’ve had a couple friends in Canada comment that when they read the blog, it looks like we’re on vacation all the time! That’s exactly what we love about living here, we don’t need to go anywhere to enjoy our favourite things. Every time we see an ad on TV for a vacation somewhere tropical, we think, well, that looks great – but we already live here 🙂

On the topic of things tropical, we were out on Friday night to celebrate Phil’s 65th birthday and made a bunch of awesome new friends. One couple, Sandy and Ian, are fruit farmers and said their son would be at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning, so we popped by their stall and bought what would be considered exotic fruits in Canada:

The berries at the front are mulberries. The colour of blackberries, the style of raspberries, the shape of grapes – and, surprisingly, they have a bit of a melon taste, gross, so that meant Hugh had to look after eating them 🙂 They are apparently used to create colour because the purple stains really well – so well that you have to be careful what you put them in. Fortunately, we were warned in advance so were careful :). Apparently there is another type of mulberry that is more the shape of a raspberry and tastes less melon-y so will have to keep an eye out for those.

Behind the mulberries is a reed avocado. There are lots of varieties of the usual shape of avocado, but we hadn’t seen the round reed ones before. Sandy and Ian’s son explained that these ones are better for mashing when making avo toast, so we’ll try that and report back how it compares to the other local avocados.

Then there’s the yellowy-orange fruit – they’re called Loquats. If you read the link, you’ll see that Brisbane City Council classifies them as weeds :). I was expecting these ones to have a melon-y taste but they didn’t. I can’t figure out how to describe them but they’re quite tasty and a really nice size for a quick snack. They have a few small pits inside and otherwise, you just bite right into them.

I think the fingerling bananas in the photo are old news, I told you about them not long after we moved here. They come from a different farmer at the market and they’re a really delicious form of banana.

I mentioned last time that we had to decide what to do with our first home-grown lemon – Hugh made crepes so I could have English pancakes (crepes with lemon juice and icing sugar, yum!):

One last tropical image – our pineapple garden in the front yard (we have 5 growing in the front and another 3 growing in the back yard):

The nankeen kestrel that visits our bird bath in the front yard from time to time found himself a unique spot to have a bath this weekend. There’s a little corner section where a bird his size could stand upright and not be fully immersed – we’ve never seen any bird have a bath there before! It’s tucked in behind the bog filter that’s covered in purple flowers right now. He would jump in, have a splash, then jump out to the edge of the pond to take a look around:

The fish of course ensure they’re well out of sight when the birds are around! But some came up to say hello later:

One of the reeds in the pond developed a growth awhile back, which we thought might be a chrysalis. This growth has now developed fuzzy white tendrils on it:

Will have to keep you posted on what it turns into. Speaking of insects, the bottlebrush trees in our back yard are in major bloom:

And with all the blooms come HUNDREDS (thousands?) of bees! Our patio furniture is about 30 feet from the trees and you can hear the hum of all the bees getting the nectar from the flowers, it’s incredible. There are two types of bees in the tree (also in our lavender plant) – one looks like what we’d call a honey bee in Canada, the other is really small and black and is called a stingless bee. Neither one bothers us – they’re far too busy with the flowers to pay us much attention. I’m glad we have items in the back yard that bees love!

Another sign it’s September – Christmas decor has appeared in the shops!

And speaking of signs, another classic Australian sign advertising an event while leaving out rather critical information (it’s crazy how often we see this – either missing the date, time, or location):

Interestingly, instruction manuals here are brutal as well – there’s lots of black text on white paper but it’s surprisingly difficult to get to the information you really need. I’ve given up trying to figure out the various settings on our washing machine and dryer. Maybe Aussies prefer to just figure things out themselves so signage and instruction manuals are superfluous.

Some more Aussie vocab for you:

“across that” – “on top of”, for example “I’m across that” meaning you’ve got it covered

“drink driving” = “drunk driving”

So I lied at the beginning – I am saving the best for last! I think I told you that Aussies are crazy for beetroot (and they don’t say beets, they say beetroot). At a great restaurant in town, they always have fabulous sweets on display, and one of them is always beetroot chocolate cake. So my friend Sharyn and I went for morning tea and beetroot cake. We also got a slice of hummingbird cake in case the beetroot cake was disgusting. Hummingbird cake is sort of like carrot cake – but if Sharyn didn’t want her daughter to steal hers, she would tell her it was made out of hummingbirds :). I have never liked anything I’ve ever tried that involved beets prepared in any way – but guess what, I liked the beetroot cake! It was actually quite delicious. And I even boldly dared to try the julienned beetroot on the top – it was candied and pretty good too. I was shocked. But the best part was enjoying the morning with Sharyn and I got this fabulous photo of her with our cakes and coffee and tea:

Well it’s 8:45pm on Sunday night and I’m wiped. We had a pickleball comp today and Anthony, Vicki, Hugh, and I came in a solid 8th place (I’ll leave out that there were only 10 teams entered…). It was a lot of games out in the gorgeous Queensland sun and I think we’ll sleep well tonight. Have a terrific week, everyone!

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