What are your ‘Lake Names’? - Part 2
(This article is from an older NEWSETTER ARCHIVE)
Not being an avid (or, I am told, competitive) racer, I have a bit more time to admire the beauty of the lake and the little bays and inlets, islands, and beaches.
Even over the last 6 months I have noticed the features and shoreline change as the lake waters or rise. Dry creek beds can become quieter, peaceful little coves. So as the seasons and water levels come and go, spots you may usually just pass by suddenly invite further examination.
As I mentioned last time, my family has sailed and paddled at the lake for over 30 years, so we have a few stories to tell. As the years go by we have built up a mental list of place names to mark visits or misadventure. Some names are unimaginative, others have a backstory.
Again, with thanks/apologies to Google Maps I have shown a few of the spots we remark about with a brief explanation. I’ll cover places in the Eastern parts of lake up to the powerlines. I’d be interested to know the names you have for the places you explore or the landmarks you pass by.
The East:
Like many stories involving potential supernatural occurrences, this one has grown in the telling. And it starts with the usual preface – I wasn’t there, I only heard this from someone who says they were there at the time. An African fish is found in numbers in the lake, it’s from Mozambique, it is called Tilapia and the species is a noxious pest. Our close friends from the Pine Rivers Fish Management Association PRFMA (who are committed carers of the lake’s water life and native fish) would know about how this species spread in Australian waterways and about efforts to eradicate them. Having successfully invaded the lake, the fish hadn’t factored in a particularly cold snap of weather some years ago – resulting in an unusually low water temperature for winter. Anyone who has had a capsize into the lake in winter knows that ‘colder than usual for winter’ is probably quite unlike what you’d expect to feel like in South Eastern Africa from where Tilapia originate. So these sad creatures died in huge numbers from the cold. And then washed against the shores of the lake creating a foul smell and attracting further pests. Amazingly though, and this is what I heard, many of the fish in the southern shallows of the lake near the boat ramp, while looking dead to the untrained eye, were merely unconscious! One afternoon the warmth of the sun was just enough to wake them for one last great swim to the North West. In a tragic twist (for them) most of the fish - it is said - swam to the place now called Tilapia Waft where some inquisitive long-time LSWSA members discovered the fish had re-enacted a miracle of evolution to crawl someway up onto land - where upon they had evidently finally expired. Some sort of heard/schooling/politeness instinct? I am just telling you what I heard.
The little bay you overlook from the Clubhouse looking East is Watties’s Bay, named after long time member and monohull racer Wattie Morris. The Wattie’s Seat at Memorial Garden under the trees was also named in his honour. Wattie and friends sailed large wooden boat and were a fixture at LSWSA for many years. Wattie was too great a man for me to instead nickname this bay “Cliff’s Other Boat Ramp” as Cliff would have thus gotten three place name mentions and I’m still traumatised by trying to help him get his huge boat and vehicle out of the mud there one cold wintry afternoon. Why boat, vehicle and Cliff were there rather than the concrete boat ramp around the corner is another one of those unexplained mysteries. The foreshore area has also been called in more recent times Pirate’s Cove as great place for a Pirate party for the kids around Christmas time.
The lake only glows in the moonlight at Nautilus Water. Over the last 6 months we have been hosting the Pine Rivers Radio Yacht Club (PRRYC) off the point and in Wattie’s Bay. They are well set up and have protocols for handling equipment failure should it ever occur. In setting out the basis for our cooperation with them, one story came to mind about the time years ago when a Nuclear-Powered Submarine sank in the lake. Well, it wasn’t really an atomic powered vessel, it was a remote-controlled scale model. Many is a joke that starts with laughter and ends in tears, as the story apparently found its way to the local the newspaper as a giggle - the relevant authorities were rightly somewhat alarmed. The craft was recovered intact, and no ‘radioactive’ (or battery) material leaked. No remote things at the lake please unless you are part of a recognised group and have the processes in place with the Management Committee!
Sailing or kayaking South East you’ll hear The Bellbirds which I believe have only been at the lake in numbers the last 10 years. [I realise this bit doesn’t apply to people with foiling Catamarans as they would either be whizzing along making that cool noise up on their foils and not hearing the birds, or they would be drifting about complaining loudly about the lack of wind and not hearing the birds]. Bellbirds sound nice but they’re also invasive and can drive other birdlife away and damage trees. [No, having said that, maybe this bit does apply to catamaran sailors?]. They remind me (the Bellbirds) that even though the lake is a beautiful man-made place, we are impacting on the environment and the results can be unpredictable.
Travelling South East, past C-mark is the Airport Channel. This is a series of inlets, one is not so far from the road and can be seen through the trees when the water is up. Some particularly ‘frugal’ people used to park their vehicles dangerously on the bend of the main road and clamber through thigh high, prime snake-spotting bushland to get an oar into those waters. Struck me as easier and safer to join the club and Kayak from the beach. Anyway, one day, far up there in the later hours of the afternoon (a particularly lovely time of day in there) I got a call from my sister, asking me to get a member of her family of the plane in an hour and a half. This place is named for the moral dilemma, yes, if we headed back straight away and scrambled the boat off the water, we’d make it. Or, we could just drift about a bit more because it was ‘too far away for us to get there in time’. I have picked up a family member from an airport with a ‘just-off-the water’ trailer sailor in tow…but not this time! The family of Deer onshore overheard my father and I weighing the plausibility of our story while sipping yet another cup of tea on the boat - the Deer didn’t buy the excuse either.
Sometimes on the water ‘looks can be deceiving’. “Yes, that racing boat must have not touched that buoy that it looked very much like it had rammed head on, as it is not performing its mandatory 360-degree penalty turn”. Or what might look to be a turtle popping its head above the water surface for air is in fact the top of an old tree you are about to scape. Heading North out of the airport Channel, past the C-mark, heading to the North you pass the Pelican Reeds. With the water level up a little island forms, and for many months we spotted white shapes lurking in the sticks between the island and the peninsula. Most days it was a Pelican or two, but then for some months there was a white rowing dingy sitting seemingly hidden at the water’s edge. Was this the boat of someone ‘cropping’ in the bush as had been discovered some years ago? Was it some other clandestine activity? No, I discovered it was apparently a boat being used for a birdlife study. But it was fun to speculate, you still see the odd Pelican.
Someone must remember what those signs used to say that are near the powerlines on both shores? Something about electricity I imagine. The Sign in question faces West and sits in the scrub on the northern peninsulas - as it has for many years, its message long faded. These days, it seems it is an empty, blank face staring back you. Maybe for some it now serves as mirror, or a testament to authority now forgotten. Maybe it is a memorial to common-sense, or things that shouldn’t need to be said, like don’t sail or paddle under or near the power lines and be sure to respect the PRFMA’s activities on that side of the islands. Anyway, I say keep it blank!
I sometimes wonder if my good friend Pieter really only likes me because my wife has a Dutch name. I do keep him busy fixing my boat, so that might be a reason too. I met Pieter with his boat sails down as he drifted in his boat in Dutchman’s Cove. We are really fortunate at LSWSA for the presence of more than one person of Netherlands descent, life member and a tireless committee member John Boetje (now passed away) is another. Lou Zylstra, who despite sailing a Catamaran, shows the great marine skill and tradition of these fine people (Lou reminds me that he’s actually Frisian by origin – so who are the better sailors?). Said Dutchman Pieter, a former committee member himself, who inspired the name for all those wonderful people from the Netherlands was OK and just testing out some improvements he had made to his boat. And he sailed back in time to help me fix something I had broken in the just 30 minutes after we first met. He has been busy ever since…
It’s a rare foray up into the river to the North, and done with a full lake, good breeze and due care for the PRFMA’s work. But one fine day, when I felt adventurous, I sailed up the river, and as readers of previous newsletters may recall we sailed through a gap in the time/space continuum. It was a bit like they did in that cheesy 80’s movie the Final Countdown. Except rather than being on a modern Aircraft Carrier mysteriously zapped to WWII with Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen and Katherine Ross, I was sailing a somewhat smaller, old green Farr 6000 with my father, sister and her kids. (My boat tacked a bit like an Aircraft Carrier in the river as gets pretty narrow). Anyway, we then happened upon a medieval crofter barging his wares to some town market in Europe during the Middle Ages. Or that is what it looked like in Crofters Reach. It was in the direction of Dayboro – which probably makes sense now I think about it. Might have been a fisherman but he looked pretty olde worlde to us. He looked startled too, what you’d expect….
I’ve got a mate Pete in New Zealand who is a very good sailor. He reckons boats aren’t tippy, it is just how you sail them to the conditions. I’d have loved his wise advice, and his implied “so are you saying you fall in a lot James” mastery of small boat sailing when I tried to skipper 2 blokes who rocked up to the Lake with an old and heavy version of one those Sydney Harbour 16ft Racing skiffs. They bought it cheap. With practice we got it to stay upright… mostly… they should have sold it to my mate Pete. Anyway, another such vessel was a wooden hulled Fireball dingy which my Dad got given when he ran the Nudgee College Sailing Club. It was less tippy than the skiff, but my friends who raced it occasionally at the lake got lots of winter ‘water time’. Dad and I got the knack and had a bit of fun on it, until one day we got into the teeth a nasty Sou’wester that built one winter’s afternoon. We capsized once too often and with the weight of the boat (and a flooded mast), the wet sails and fatigue we couldn’t get it back upright without it slamming back over into the water. We drifted to the North East getting colder and more tired, but with a bit of effort we directed ourselves to the Shores of Fireball Island. My father got quite cold, but we were able to warm up on the shores, as, you guessed it, the usual saviour for my life’s misadventures arrived having paddled all the way from the clubhouse. Thanks Mum!
Those our stories so far. What are yours? James Flaherty.