Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

The Sea Scouts' busy bee

Yesterday was earmarked as Busy Bee day at 1st Fremantle Sea Scouts. My wife and I and three of our kids rocked up to lend a hand in the moring and were there for most of the day. One of our 'kids' was 27 year old son number two. His task as a master plumber was to supervise the replacement of a section of large diameter concrete underground stormwater drain pipe with new PVC stuff. It was a major job and luckily he had the help of half a dozen Sea Scout fathers.

The job took a few hours. Getting the old stuff out was straight forward, physical work for the volunteers. Lots of digging. The pipes were heavy because they were full of silt. When they'd been installed decades ago no one had thought to put in inspection points for maintenance. Anyway the men did a great job. There's few things worse than blocked drains, but that's been fixed now for many years to come.

Elsewhere, parents were cutting down dead trees and testing the capacity outdoor campfire area with the unwanted branches. This was more in keeping with the physical abilities of me and my wife.

Later both of us helped sort out a collection of old books in the Scout Hall library. There was a large assortment of publications intended to wise up Scout leaders on organising interesting activities, as for example a booklet titled, Jungle Dances and their variations. But they were from the days when kids were allowed to exercise their imaginations around the adventurous themes espoused by Rudyard Kipling. No one does jungle dances anymore lest some ethnic minority is offended

One of the tasks I've undertaken is to scan these booklets into PDF format before someone throws them all in the bin.

An especially interesting one was simply titled Seamanship by Hal McKail. It was published in Perth for local Sea Scouts and yachtsmen. This copy was a third edition printed in 1944, during WW2. It contained sketch maps of the Swan River and offshore islands with handy hints for navigating past danger spots. Here's an hypothetical excerpt from page 34 on piloting to Fremantle Harbour then back past the part of the river where the 1st Fremantle Sea Scouts are located:

Through the bridges

A red dolphin to port gives us a fine lead to the bridges. In going through there it is the rule to keep to the right, and it is wise to get the span clearly sighted well before we reach it, as if the tide is going out we may get a nasty bump. The railway bridge in particular is full of all sorts of nasty tricks. A reef to the starboard between the two bridges needs to be carefully avoided.

Now for the return journey. It has fallen dark, but as far as the flashing dolphin we shall have no trouble. The wind is rather westerly at to beat round Rocky Bay will be a tiresome business. But as we pass the flashing dolphin on the far side of the way, are two little pumping plants. Steering for the lower of these we shall find a swatch-way with two or three feet of water, and the wind will just carry us through nicely...

The reef between the bridges was removed in about the 1960s and the old railway bridge replaced to make way for Fremantle harbour extensions. However, modern generations of yachtsmen might still recognise much of what is written in the second paragraph. By coincidence I took a photo yesterday of an aggregation of shags in a feeding frenzy and it shows the modern version of the "flashing dolphin on the far side of the way." Click Here to see it. The shags followed the school of fish up the river and were out of sight withing a few minutes. What I'd like to discover is how did so many birds figure this out at the same time.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!

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