This will hurt me...

Men in a boat. The Derwent Estuary, as seen from Shot Tower, Taroona. May 2013. Theme Thursday already an the theme is 'LETTER'. Today's letter is... V .

Thar be an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Cremorne Beach, Cremorne. June 2011. Strength through unity . Strength through duty . Strength through love . Strength through hope . Strength through logic . Strength through weakness . Strength through faith . Strength through fear . Strength through joy . Strength through muscle . Pick one...

An odd place to PARK. Geilston Bay, June 2010. What a place to PARK! That should be a ticket… Yes, Theme Thursday today, and PARK is our theme. I was going to go with “St Johns PARK” – the new worksite – but I have already just done that. Ideas are often like that; they come and go too soon. Which leaves me with today’s photograph. This poignant little vessel, stricken and forsaken on its side like a metaphorical Minke whale stranded on the pebbly-beach of misplaced and premature creative expressions. Artistic endeavours can get quite messy sometimes, to the point that not even the most ingenious of metaphors can redeem it. What You should take from this is that the tricky Theme Thursday topic can be fudged with just a little bit of imagination.

Tall ship is Sullivan's Cove as viewed through the window of a water taxi, March 2010. I've just finished reading the blackly comic (and unremittingly bleak) The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills on the bus in this morning. By golly if there was ever a book to explore the notion of work as a domineering force in the lives of workers, this is it! Check it out, even if your headspace is akin to mine at the moment.

Almost one year on from a previous post , the Diamond Princess is back, and some blokes are fiddling about below! It's the main problem with these big tourist vessels: wealthy passengers are so haphazard with their diamond tiaras and lobster claws, always dropping them over the side and scratching the Duco. Some poor mug (or two) always ends up each morning down with a can of paint and a roller, touching up the marks. Tut tut . That's the problem with the inconceivably wealthy, no respect!

The water taxi chugs its way across the Derwent River Estuary towards Sullivan's Cove, perhaps from the Geilston Bay pier, loaded with cranky toddlers ready to hit the pubs and clubs and give the usual gang of pissed idiots a run for their money. One can only hope!

So yesterday we went down to check out the chickie babes pleasure craft down on the waterfront. Much to our surprise, we found this Christmas tree perched upon a cray boat. What the crayfish make of the sight as they are pulled from the murky depths to their eventual deaths, I am not sure. Henry and Ezra, on the other hand, enjoyed it very much.

He is our old mate L'Astrolabe basking in the sun again down in Sullivan's Cove. They'll be off molesting penguins again soon. It’s a very serious business. A very serious business indeed .

Here we have a ferry coming into Sullivan's Cove from the Eastern Shore. Henry and I are currently discussing plans to launch into our own adventure on the high seas, but haven't quite decided on how big a boat we should start off with. After seeing Jaws , we are erring on bigger .

Here you can see the water taxi making a quick getaway from Sullivan's Cove one afternoon. I've not done so, but I could catch this one home, as it stops just over the road from us in Geilston Bay. If you can believe it, it actually works out cheaper than a road taxi. A bit pricier than the bus, however. Sometimes I get very tired. When I am, very tired, I know that my patience shortens and that I am prone to saying nasty things. Accordingly, because I know what can happen when I get very tired , I often choose to not say anything at all in order to avoid saying anything nasty that would really be about tiredness rather than nastiness . Yet on occasion, people assume that to not say anything means that you must be angry even though you're not angry you're just tired and at that point the silence isn't about anger because you're not angry, you're tired . Of course, the fact that people keep asking why you're angry even though you're not angry (you...

I COULD wax lyrical about how everybody is linked to everybody else in some small way, and how we're all dependent on each other yaddah yaddah yaddah BUT I'M NOT because I CAN'T BE BOTHERED. What I will say is that I quite like this photograph. I like how the reflection plays off the water and I like how the colours are all a bit grimy and most off all I like the tension is quite evident when you look at the rope. And it should be. This flimsy little rope is all that's mooring a catamaran not much smaller than this one here . There is something terribly impressive about that!

This picture was taken last week, but I have decided to use it today. You see these guys down on the waterfront every Wednesday, and they always seem to have plenty of takers for their cruises. It would no doubt be very pleasant, as the Derwent is reasonably flat right all the way down south (until you get out into the ocean, that is. Then it gets hairy!) Contrast this with the number of attempts to set up a catamaran service that could cope with the Bass Strait crossing, from George Town to Melbourne. These Tasmanian-made vessels do very well in around the globe (in the Mediterranean, Baltic, Caribbean, the eastern seaboard of North America, Japan, the Middle East, they even supply the US Navy). While the ‘Devil Cat’ was an extraordinarily cool-looking vessel without doubt, it unfortunately did not seem to cope well with Bass Strait’s unique tendency to big swells, especially in winter. My father worked on this run for a short while, and tells wonderful stories of seamen endlessly...

Here is a photograph that Henry and I took on Sunday afternoon during our long walk. This one is of the brig The Lady Nelson sailing down the Derwent River. Henry was terribly disappointed that no cannons were fired, and I didn't have the heart to tell him that perhaps there weren't pirates on board.