Surfing and squid on Straddie

Continuing the extreme sporting theme we returned to Straddie for a few days after New Year for some surfing action.

We camped just behind Cylinder beach in a perfect location. Perfect apart from the ranger, who made us move our entire tent because our guy ropes were two inches over the ‘orange line’. Still it’s good to see crazy bureaucracy alive and well on a beautiful sand island.

Our surf teacher Murray, met us at 7 in the morning and taught us the basics of how to stand up on a surf board, we then went out on our enormous soft boards and put into practise our new skills. We don’t have any photos unfortunately as we were all strutting our stuff, but we all managed to stand up at least once and we all also put together some spectacular wipe outs.

Matt got stung by a bluebottle on the first morning and I did the second day but the excitement of surfing was too much to take us from the sea so we carried on just a bit more nervous of the little blue buggers.

The island is absolutely beautiful and the water amazingly clear, on a quick walk around the cliffs we saw leopard sharks, dolphins, turtles and these huge Manta rays with wing spans of way over a metre…

Yet again, we ate magnificently. On the first night we found a guy selling king prawns which we cooked on the Barbie with sweet potato roasted in a fire built by caveman Brown..

But it was the second night we surpassed ourselves with freshly caught squid marinated in lime and chilli and barbequed.

We got so excited by this that we may have had a little more to drink than expected….

Still nothing to stop us from getting up for surfing in the morning….