Sydney shark attack

Writing this feeling dog tired as a result of Simon catching the early plane to Melbourne and consequently crashing round the room like a wounded buffalo well before dawn. Tiredness not helped by being the only person to turn up at Boot Camp this morning which meant I was unable to follow my usual survival mechanism of having a crafty breather lurking behind my fitter ‘Camping Colleagues’.

Tomorrow’s dilemma is going to be how to keep the paper away from No. 1 daughter as the headline news will be a shark attack on a navy diver in the harbour today. The diver survived but I gather he lost a hand and was badly mauled. She generally spends a fair proportion of each Saturday’s dinghy race in the water getting the boat upright after numerous capsizes, and in fact is currently sporting 3 stitches in her knee from one particular dunking – I suspect from now on she will be a moving blur in the water, never will a boat be righted as quickly, particularly if she has any bleeding wounds. Apparently January and February are prime times for the bigger sharks to be in the harbour and they are being seen more frequently now because Sydney Harbour is so much cleaner than it used to be. Commercial fishing in the harbour was stopped a couple of years ago and consequently there are much greater numbers and varieties of fish floating around, all adding up to a shark smorgasbord. Having said that I will still be pushing visitors out into the water at Balmoral, our local harbour beach – the last fatal attack was in the 1960’s and it has been 9 years since the last shark incident so the odds against ending up as a shark snack pack are pretty good. The picture at the top of this blog is of the shark net at Balmoral – rather unfortunately in light of today’s attack, after lots of argument the council took it down last year – I’m sure the local paper is going to be flooded with lots of “I told you so” letters.

Whilst on the topic of Australia’s dangerous wildlife, ironically whilst Victoria and South Australia have had a heat wave and then devastating fires, North Queensland has been flooded out and various towns have been cut off for a week or so. According to one laconic report I heard filed from a small town, the two major problems they were experiencing were that firstly the town was about to run out of beer and secondly the local crocodiles had taken to swimming down the main street – in true Crocodile Dundee style you can guess which predicament worried them most.