Augusta with the family

So for the last four days we stayed in Augusta which is a small holiday town about 300km south of Perth. I still haven't quite got my head around this but apparently it's common in Australia to choose holiday destinations that are COOLER than your home town in the summer. Bizarre thinking.

Anyway Augusta was a bit cooler but still in the 30s so not exactly icy. Ian brought his little boat down and we did fishing, and of course got the surfboard out behind the boat and did some wakeboarding as well. On Tuesday we went to this place called Hamelin Bay which was awesome.

It was a huge sheltered crescent-shaped beach with a lot of rock formations offshore. Along the shallows, stingrays would come up so far in the surf they almost beached themselves before flapping off into the depths again. Some guys were feeding them fish heads so I took the opportunity to stroke some. They felt strange, almost velvety. Joe actually got bitten by one that was somewhat overenthusiastic in grabbing the fish head out of his hand. It drew blood but it wasn't deep. A stingray bite is a pretty cool injury anyway if you ask me.

Joe, Lotti and I swam out about 400 metres to a rocky outcrop. What looked like a tiny rock on the surface was actually huge underwater (like an iceberg) depth was about 7m. The rock formations underwater were incredible, swimming around those was some of the best snorkeling I've done so far, huge crevices, great big leather corals an hundreds of different types of fish. I wish I'd had my scuba gear, my breath holding ability leaves something to be desired at those depths.

It was great spending my new year with my family. They are leaving this evening, I will miss them a bit. Luckily I have plenty of exciting stuff planned for this month to take my mind off it. I am going into Perth for a couple of days Monday and Tuesday to do my first aid course. I'm meeting up with some guys while I'm down there, should be good fun :-D

Laters.