Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Killikrankie and the north parts

'If ye hae'seen wha' I hae' seen, on the Braes o' Killikrankie-o' (Scots trad.) -- We took the boys on the big expotition to the North yesterday, despite the weather actually being worse. Killikrankie - besides being the site of a famous battle in Scotland is also the name of a village on Flinders and the climbing area about 2 km north. Very useful multipurpose name I am sure could be used for a bunch of other stuff too:-). It's about 40Km beyond the black stump (the black stump is clearly marked on a large fire-blackend stump - local sense of humour appeals to my own twisted sense of the same.) The wind was gale force, so we were more doing a scout than anything else. The crag is magnicent -wind-carved (there is a little zephyr here once in a while) and convoluted granites, overlooking a coastline of perfect little coves, looking as if some amatuerish chef had attacked the pastry-sheet of land with a scallop-edged cookie-cutter. The sea was wild and tormented and churning with torn seaweed drifts. We still managed to catch some 'wrasse' (scorned locally, very popular in the far East). Barbs caught our first Flinders fish - and later, the biggest too... well nearly. She got this enormous fish to the very edge and James tried to help her land it. I assume he must have touched the leader, as it broke - and James -hyper with excitement jumped in after it. It slipped away - but unfortunately the water didn't. With the wind and wet, we had a very cold James. Anyway, we have now caught a local fish or three (we fished for about 3/4 of an hour and caught about 14 of these things - learning all the time) 3 were size and we brought them back. They're fairly soft-fleshed delicate flavour - not clean-flaking, and probably respond badly to even the slightest over-cooking, but otherwise perfectly edible.

BigPond - you know the internet provider part of Telstra that gave us such a dreadful run-around, finally got around to trying to reply to their reply within 48 hours max online service -- a week later. They appear not have the vaguest what is happening in their own company as they had no idea what had happened since. Ah well. Every ointment must have its fly. With luck we'll deal with this one too.

And now to work. books need to be written.

1 comment:

  1. "I'm feeling rather Killikrankie myself" -- You're right! It is a versatile word.

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