Narooma

We awoke to a very strong smell of smoke in the air and a very strange light. The sun couldn’t penetrate the smoke and gave the sky a colour that we’d only seen once before and that was during a solar eclipse. The firies had all left at around 7am and a couple of the mobile homes had already left.

We sought advice from the camp manager. It has never been our intention to become part of the problem .... but not sure if nature will help us to achieve that.

The Rural Fire Service released a map overnight showing the fires and the burnt areas, just as I have on my app, however, they added their prediction for fires if the temperature reached the expected 40C and the wind became westerly. The map put us in the middle of a fire hazard. This was purely a prediction but the advice was that we shouldn’t stray too far, Narooma is a safe place.

We decided to go to Mystery Bay, apparently it hadn’t been evacuated yesterday, somewhere else had been. We set off the few miles down the A1, arrived at the Mystery Bay Road to find it closed. Back to Narooma for b’fast.

We found a lovely cafe with views across the bay and treated ourselves to b’fast and work out what to do today. The reasons for coming to the area are to visit Mystery Bay and to see if we can get a trip to Montague Island to snorkel and dive with the seals. The boats were not going to the island because most of their bookings had cancelled coming to the area.

We planned a couple of maintenance chores for Bertha and then drove down to see if the seals were about. The one we had seen the day before was still sleeping in front of the fish gutting table on the quayside. We then drove around to the harbour entrance where a number of seals were sleeping on the rocks on the inside of the breakwater. The sea was looking quite ferocious with waves breaking over the breakwater.

Time for a dip. The temperature wasn’t 40C and there was little sun, but there wasn’t much wind either. There were a number of places to choose from, the beach in the estuary near the bridge, the beach with the shark net or the beach without the shark net. Knowing we weren’t going to be in the sea long enough to attract sharks, we elected for the final option..

I’m sure the sea today was no colder than yesterday, but without the sun, it felt a lot cooler. A quick swim and out, back to Bertha for a cuppa. Back to the campsite to get a pitch, do some laundry and then go out to the cinema to watch Jo Jo Rabbit, a bit weird but quite entertaining.

We walked over the road to the pub for a beer and watch the sun go down and the bats fly into nearby trees to eat the fruit and then we went back to camp. The new moon is bright red as the sun was when it went down. Smoke has been in the air all day, but the horizon showed a blue line between the sea and the smoke, so we guess the smoke was quite high.

As I finish this, the wind has picked up and is shaking Bertha, the weather f’cast says winds of 46-59km/h, I wonder what that will do to the fires and what tomorrow will bring?Read more