28 weeks and counting....

We're well on our way with preparations for our new arrival - this weekend, we bought a cot! We had worried about choosing a pram only to find that there's a 6 month delivery time, so we got on the case with that a while ago and put one on layby along with a matching basinette and a car seat/capsule. Confident that we'd be right with that for a few months after the baby's born, we've been hunting around with no pressure for a second hand cot. I thought we'd seen every possible cot, and was ready to shell out $450 on a second hand Boori (over $700 new....) when slogging through saturday morning traffic to do the round of the "pre-loved" shops turned up a perfectly good cot for $129. Done deal :)

I've finished reading what turned out to be an excellent book - "So you're going to be a dad". I thought it'd be a load of american claptrap, but it is in fact pretty amusing and written about becoming a dad in Oz. I confess to chuckling out loud several times on the bus :)

We had probably our last camping trip for a while on the May bank holiday weekend, which was an absolute delight - very, very relaxing. We had one night booked camping at Peregian Beach near Noosa, so we took a long route there through the Glasshouse Mountains, stopping at Maleny and Montville to browse through the shops. After Montville, the tourist drive heads straight back to the highway, but we turned off and followed a dirt road through the forest and past the Kondalilla Falls National Park - I swear the Subaru starting grinning as soon as we got off the tarmac! I also grinned a lot :)


We reached Noosa at 4pm-ish, and to my dismay the ocean was like a lake - no swell at all. Nonetheless, I picked up a hireboard from Noosa Longboards for a dawn session the next day. While we were at the NL shop, we met Robert August who famously was one of the surfers in the legendary surf-travel movie "Endless Summer". He seemed like a genuinely nice guy.

I then went for a quick swim at Noosa Main Beach. While I was splashing about and body surfing, the surf lifesavers made some announcement or other, which I couldn't really make out, but I noticed that people started to get out of the water. I bodysurfed a couple more waves, then got out myself. Skye was waiting for me on the beach and it turns out that the announcement was something like "several shark sightings in the area, surf lifesavers about to end their shifts for the day, swim with caution". well, the most cautionary swimming when there's been shark sightings is not to swim at all in my book!!

Sharks aside, there was a fantastic sunset that evening - Skye and I got all arty with our cameraphones:


I didn't let that stop me surfing the next morning, although I did make sure I surfed where there were a few other guys (safety in numbers...) and I really freaked myself out looking down into the water and seeing a shadow that looked *exactly* like a shark, but which turned out to be some rocks beneath me. Phew. Had a really good session that morning at Tea Tree Bay, then returned in the late afternoon for an even better session. The resident Tea Tree Bay turtle popped his head up a couple of times near me - always a pleasure. In between surfing, Skye and I had a pleasant walk from the National Park to Little Cove and back, with a picnic lunch.

...but why was I surfing on a hire board? The sorry news is that my board is back at the shop. Again. I don't think I'll go through all the details here, as it's just too depressing. In a nutshell, a strip of fibreglass inexplicably tore off the underside of the nose halfway through a session at Currumbin. I'm hoping that the manufacturer will recognise that it's unacceptably poor build quality and replace the board, or will at least cover the costs of the repair. Here's what it looks like:

And on a final note, the ASP Billbong Pro at Teahupoo in Tahiti is on at the moment - here's an absolutely classic photo of one of the world's top surfers about to experience some serious pain: