Spirit of the place: Wet Season Magic

So here we are in the New Year!...

In our potted garden...One of our Bromeliad's presented us with it's first flower...

In the fishing department, Hans has been perfecting the art of throwing the net to catch bait fish and prawns when the time is right...

And I've been throwing a line in when I have spare time...

Last week I struggled for 30minutes to bring in 'something big' on my line...

Only to find I'd caught a leopard stingray!...

Oh well good practice!

This is the sign on Bob's camp...Bob is a keen fisherman...in fact the whole camp feasted on the huge Mackerel he caught the other night...Happy hour became a fish n chip night also...Yum!

This poor little fella fell out of his nest, from high above us in the Callophyllum trees, after the nest was attacked by a butcher bird...

With the wet season comes the mould in your homes, but also amazing fungi in the gardens and wet mulch around...

They only last a day...but are beautiful in their own right.

For the last few days, everyone in this area has been watching the radar and weather warnings as a cyclone was developing in the Gulf of Carpentaria north west of us...Yesterday the cyclone was named Charlotte....

Residents of Far North Queensland are well used to this being a cyclone prone time of the year as monsoonal troughs come down from the equator and cyclones develop over higher than average ocean temperatures...Cyclone kits are prepared as the area is often cut off from 'civilisation'...eg Power,Shops,Work etc

Many of the cane farmers regard the coming of cyclones as a blessing as they usually turn into rain depressions, so they don't have to irrigate their crops...

Indeed, for locals in the know it's a time to rest, reflect and enjoy the flowing rivers and watching the rainforest flower and renew itself...

The time of year in the tropics when all of life comes to a crescendo...

Well last night such a crescendo occurred, with gale force winds and torrential rain which luckily for us didn't quite coincide with the king tide...

I was up at 4am...

and was going out of the caravan for a smoke when I stepped into ankle deep water...

So of course I grabbed the camera!

Our mats were floating, the back tarp had come away, my jandals (thongs for the Aussies) had floated away...

Our neighbours Tony and Marilyn slept through the whole night oblivious to the fact that their camp outside their coaster van was under water!

Hans and I went for a 'looksie' down on the shore on daybreak....these storms bring up a fair amount of flotsam...there were coconuts bobbing up and down in the surf, pieces of trees,timber but what caught our attention was a bottle laying in the sand...check out what was in the bottle!