Today the weather has turned ugly so Im stuck inside using some of that
time to catch up on my backlog of emails, reading wots been happenin on
the list, organising a slide show on the Maldives for the UW camera club,
etc. We are supposed to be meeting up for a shore dive at Rockingham south
of Perth but with the forecast that's just flashed up on tv - 3 metre
swell & larger storm front coming through Perth later on this arvo looks
like that dive will be called off :-(

Even though Perth has had its coldest & wetest winter in 71yrs Jen and I
have still managed to nearly get a weekly night dive in the Swan River
chasing prawns. We've also been pretty lucky with the weather where we've
driven through the rain to Point Walter to arrive just as the rain was
tappering off making gearing up a lot easier. Or surfacing after a 70-75
min dive to find its bucketing down with rain but by the time we've wound
in our divelight float and finned to shore the rain has stopped. Of course
we must warm ourselves up from the inside out first with a few swigs of
brandy before packing everything away then stopping by the local roadside
haunt for chips + burger on our way home.

As word got around the office that the mad kiwi goes diving in the river
at night for prawns (everyone thinks a shark is going to turn up as soon
as I put a toe in the water) I thought I'd cook something prawnie up for
my co-workers. I managed to snare 73 decent sized prawns during the last
dive. Once I'd defrosted all the other prawns I had in the freezer I
cooked up a huge batch of prawn fritters to share amongst the Engineering
Dept work crew at the hospital I recently started working for. There is 'a
method to my madness' - now that I am in the *good-books* with the guys I
should not have any problems in future raising them on the two-way radio
or workshops public address systems to attend to a job for me.

Last Sunday was the last day of a 2 month showing of our uw camera clubs
Underwater Marine Biodiversity of Western Australia exhibition. My pics
from that display are now hanging up in the work office coz I've got no
space at home for them where they would have ended up being stored in the
spare room gathering dust. We had quite a lot of positive feedback from
the international and interstate visitors on how much variety we had in
our local waters. When I think back on having over 250 slides & digital
pics in the first call for pics from our club members which we then had to
have numerous meetings over to cull that down to 60 pics due to space
constraints at the museum. It was very difficult to cover every aspect
starting from the ground up - seaweed, seagrass, sponges, hydroids &
anemones, corals, jellyfish, worms, crustaceans, molluscs, echinoderms,
bryozoans, ascidians, fish, reptiles & mammals.

Tomorrow, well I should say Carol Reid's tomorrow, I've got my fingers
crossed that she and one of my best friends Woofie actually meet up.
Must warn you Carol that Woofie has a habit of leaving things behind - we
call them Woof droppings - so do check she's got her glasses, her purse,
passport, ya know, the things you can't replace at short notice before she
she leaves ya to take off for Inverness or where ever she's decided to
crash :-)
Viv