Gemma and I went down to the Newport Arms today for some lunch and took this picture outside the beer garden. Which incidentally is massive and was heaving with people. A really cool place to go and get pissed. It backs onto a massive estuary called the pittwater full of mental boats. A really beautiful place.

Newby is coming to stay with us in a couple of weeks and he has asked Gemma to find him some birds. This lot hang around on our balcony and I think he might have a chance. They are not picky and some of their mates are orange to!

OK, so Gemma and I put our tourist hats onto today and went up to Palm Beach to check out the setting for Home & Away. Well I didn't see Alf (he's the only one I know) so we just settled for sitting on a really beautiful beach. Quite a lot of tourists there, lots of Brits and Herman's. Not that I know a lot about it but the surf looked pretty good and there was definitely a bit of an undertow in the water when I went in. The waters pretty warm and really nice for swimming in, although the shark thing is generally nagging away at me. We caught the bus up as we haven't got ourselves a car yet, simply because they are so expensive and I am struggling with handing over money for a piece of crap. Anyway we checked out the Pittwater waterway today and it looks pretty amazing loads of little marinas and hundreds of yachts and cruisers.

This is our local beach literally across the road. On our second day on the beach a young surfer was mauled by a great white. I had only been commenting the day before that I might as well get into surfing now we were here. Had a little re-think since then.

Fortunately all the beaches around here have pretty big saltwater swimming pools on the beach.