Clovelly Bay down under

After the dry outback it was time again to find the tight-tight speedos and get wet. The walk towards the Clovelly carpark didn't exactly make me or Yiing, who I picked up at the busstop, believe that we were going to have a blast of a dive: The water was rough, it nearly started raining and a good wind blew from the East - Like a Danish summer day except for the direction of the wind.
Luckily, Clovelly pool was close by, when there is a low tide the partly man-made bay is very well protected from the surf and despite looking a bit cold it was definitely our best option. Down under the surface it was absolutely amazing; it looked like all the fish had gone for refuge in the bay as well and with very clear water I was able to take some great pictures ... until the battery ran out of juice.

From Clovelly Bay 18-04-2009

It was my first sighting of Moorish Idol here in Sydney and also a Numbfish was new to the list, however the sighting of the numbfish was a slightly sad story, it had died from trying to eat a Three-bar Porcupinefish killing both of them in the process.
Please feel free to take a look at all the pictures in my Picasa album:

Clovelly Bay 18-04-2009

Big Easter - Mungo and Hattah-Kulkyne

5 Days, 2 National Parks, 2380 Kilometers and 1300 photos, what a Easter :-)
Taking advantage of the long Easter weekend Gemma and I snuck out of Sydney Wednesday evening straight after work, trying to beat the Easter-traffic-mayhem expected to hit Sydney roads the following day.
What a great idea! We had an absolute amazing Easter with excellent camping, stunning wildlife and a lot of CousCous meals.
I had hoped for lots of reptile action in the dry end of NSW unfortunately we saw very little of such, instead there were a lot of annoying birds around, I noticed a few that I don't see around Coogee, including;
Major Mitchell's Cockatoo
Regent Parrot
Blue Bonnet
Bourke's Parrot
Chestnut-crowned Babbler
Gilbert's Whistler
And the various Thornbills, a Whiteface, wrens (not the Mallee-emu), Honeyeaters, Robins, chats and predators that like the dryness. All in all there were probably up towards 30 birds that I haven't seen before, but who is counting ... ;-)

At the moment I am trying to select the better pictures and will eventually put a couple of albums up on my Picasa account, you are obviously very welcome to take a look when that happens. Here is a few "teasers";

Edit: The pictures are now up on my picasa account, please feel free to take a look:
Mungo NP:

Mungo National Park 2009

Hattah-Kulkyne NP:

Hattah-Kulkyne National Park 2009

Blue Mountains, bush bashing around Katoomba

Zhengli had volunteered to take the Reimer's group out for a bit of bush bashing! We started out from a little sneaky free car park only few minutes walk from Echo point. After admiring the view towards the Three Sisters we started out down the mountain.

Zhengli and Sören

Yiing and Thomas

Superb Lyrebird, this one looks like a female. We saw 3 of these very close to the path in some dense bush. I tried using the flash for a couple of pictures, but a more "natural" look was achieved by pushing the ISO sensitivity up - this is taken at ISO 1250.

Welcome to my blog... more to come

Thanks for visiting my blog, I will try to enhance the entertainment factor significantly soon :-)

Tak fordi du har besøgt min blog, jeg skal gøre hvad jeg kan for at gøre den mere spændende snarest :-)

KH Allan