This year was certainly also ‘The Year of the Dog’. Once we owned 17 dogs! A year ago we still had 8, a healthy number. We are now down to one (Tiny, our son’s 12 year old Jack Russell). I decided to give away the last half dozen of my hounds to a young fellow hunter as […]
We celebrated the sale of our farm with a week’s holiday touring Tasmania in February. Strangely we did not walk the South Coast Track again but we did camp in the Franklin-Gordon and Arthur wildernesses amongst other things. This sounds a lot better than it is, particularly the Pieman-Arthur and Tarkine wildernesses which as far
Every time he turns at Centre Pass to survey the magnificent view down the Seaforth Valley to the Fiord, he wonders will it be the last time he gazes on such a magnificent view? It is the last thing you do, you should do it at least once. Steve will do it again and again.
Our commercial farm finally settled on Feb 1st so we are officially retired sheep farmers. We still have the 25 acre home property at Jeeralang Junction and about sixty Finn ewes – so we have enough to be going on with. We hope to complete the house and repair all the deterioration which has occurred
Steve’s back prevented many planned activities in 2010 but it has improved a bit so we have been more active this year. For example, in early March we walked the South Coast Track in Tas with a friend, Kerri Cleaver. This was to be a shake-down for the Dusky Track in 2012 but it was
Must have for Xmas? Look at this new torch: 788 lumens from a single 3.7V battery! Twice the best torch of last Xmas! Things just keep on getting better. My favourite pocket torch is the Fenix LD01 which takes a single AAA and outputs 85 lumens. If you (carefully) screw off the lens cover (it
Well, we have tried our faux packraft against our Alpacka raft on a four hour Grade 2+ section of the Wonnangatta River on an overnight trip (during which we saw 9 deer!) and apart from some slight abrasion to the lamination of the poly tarp (nappy) the $40 raft stood up splendidly. I found a
15/12/11: Other great inventions: the (1) Themarest Neo air (regular 370g) shown made into a chair using the (2) Big Agnes Cyclone Chair (150g) in the photo: ‘Tyvek wigwam’! All that is needed to make this scene perfect is Bacardi 151 (and Della, of course!) 15/12/11: The faux & real pack raft & the Tyvek
When we lived at Tarwin Lower we once hunted a house-sized dead whale on the shore of the inlet with hounds. We put foxhounds and bloodhounds right INSIDE the whale and shot nearly twenty foxes, some of which even came out the blowhole. Whether they were vixens making the traditional cry, ‘Thar she blows’ accurate
A friend thinks that reports of ‘black pumas’ etc may well be ‘thylaceo leo,’ the marsupial lion (there being no large black cats anywhere in the world only spotted ones) but this is a VERY long bow, though it would be nice. In 50+ years in the bush I have never even seen a large
