Some Fremantle Piccies

Fremantle is the port at the mouth of the Swan River near Perth.  It's been done up into a trendy place with cafes and shopping.  Here are some of the old buildings.

Moonlighting

I have been spending the last 3 weeks at Classic FM, our classical music network.  I'm filling in for someone away on holidays.  I'm really enjoying the chance to work on some large classical recordings - something we don't get much of a chance to do at Radio National.  I was trained in classical recording at uni, but I haven't had as much professional experience in that area as I have had in recording contemporary music and jazz.  So I'm pulling out a lot of long lost information about classical recording techniques.  And learning a lot.  It's great.

Wind surfing in Perth

I'm sorry to all my fans - I went underground for a while.  But as a special treat, I'm going to post photos of me trying wind surfing for the very first time in Perth on the Swan River.   My cousin MH who is really experienced had access to a learner board and took me for my own special lesson.   It was a lot of fun.  The learner board made it a lot easier because it's big and floats easily, so I just had to balance on it.  That wasn't so hard as I already had good balance from my childhood skateboarding.   Now I wasn't really good or anythig, but I used to skate up and down our driveway as an 8 year old on my own green fibreglass skate board that I bought for $8 from K-Mart.

So once you are crouching on the board you have to pull the sail up and stand, which is quite difficult with wind blowing around.  And then you sail.   It was hard keeping control of the sail with the wind gusting and blowing it out of my hands, but I managed to have a good surf once I got the hang of it.

The good thing about the Swan River is it's very shallow for a long way out, so when you fall off it's pretty easy to get back on again.  At one stage I got a bit carried away and ended up quite a long way out and fell off and to my shock my feet didn't touch the bottom!.  And getting back on was impossible, so I had to swim the board closer to shore untill i could touch the bottom and scramble back on again.

The other thing you need to work out is how to go back the other way and and sail against the wind do you don't end up way down the other end of the river.  I managed to even turn araound on the baord and sail back the other direction, right when MH wasn't watching.  And then I wasn't able to do it again to prove I could do it.

I had to stop when the wind started to pick up too much and all the experienced surfers turned up.  But I had a decent go.  I ended up with very bruised shins from getting back on the board, plus a really big bruise from a fin scrape.  Plus really sore arms from pulling the sail up.

The damage