Pirogue Saturday Sail

Now that the weather is warming up, and the Spring gales seem to have passed on, its time to get out on the water again.

I have been inspired by Dylan Winter and his Keep Turning Left blog with his wonderful films of sailing UK coastal and inland waters.  His Duck Punt films are well worth a look.   They reminded me how much fun sailing a flatbottom boat in shallow waters can be, so I dusted off the Bolger 12 Pirogue ("Peero") that has been sadly neglected of recent years, and went for a sail from the nearby beach down to the mouth of the Kororoit Creek.

My waterproof camera is pretty basic, but I learned a few things today.  One is make sure you have cleared all the old stuff off the camera storage.  The SD card was full by the time I got to the interesting part of the trip. Another good lesson is that salt water doesn't really improve picture quality.




But it was a lot of fun.  A short voyage in a small boat can seem like a big adventure.  I saw a banjo shark sunning itself in the shallows, terns diving,  pacific gull chicks in varying degrees of mottled plumage, swans, dogs bounding cheerfully through the RAMSA wetlands (no wonder the waders don't seem to come here anymore) and lots and lots of Bluebottles.

Interesting things, Bluebottles - also known as Portuguese Man'o'war or "floating terror" because of the intensely painful sting caused by contact with their tentacles.  I can't recall every seeing them in Port Phillip Bay before.  They were all over the beach at Norman Bay in Wilsons Prom earlier this week when we were down that way.  That's over 200 kilometres away.  There must be millions of them out there, fleets of them sailing around driven by their weird float bubbles,  like something out of a sci-fi horror movie.  Is it global warming that has brought them down our way?  Whatever, it is going to make swimming in the bay a lot less relaxing this summer.

Post script: To prove the adage that a patch of ice doth not a winter make, the Bluebottle invasion came and went remarkably quickly.  Within a week there were only the occassional sad little blue hat poking out of the sand in odd places. They have moved on to terrorize some other coast line. So we got a good swimming summer in, except for the days when heavy rain washed all the dog poo from Melbourne's streets into the bay causing it to become a massive bio hazard.