A few snags and ales later it was time for us to give the love birds some peace and quiet and to motor back upstream for about half a click (if that) and pull in for the night at "The Lagoon" at Herrison Island. We had it all to ourselves and all was calm with much high pitch whining in the air. Bloody mosquitoes ! Ah well, the price of taking shelter from the wind ... and nothing a bit of roll-on repellent didn't fix.
About 10am we managed to raise enough energy to motor back out into the river and so we headed off and found a great position next to the skyshow perimeter looking back at the city from South-Eastish Perth. A bit of a battle getting to it mind you. It was low tide so I had to pull up the 135hp outboard and drop down the 8hp kicker instead - and even THAT had to be kept with prop about level with the bottom of the keel in order to avoid kicking up mud and crap !
Not a place to be diving off boats. Anyway, here we are in the afternoon chop which fortunately did settle down in the early evening and by midnight had become dead calm for the rest of the night. Oh, and not only did we have the Biggest Flag in those parts of the river, but I only saw one other Red Ensign anyway. The Channel 10 news chopper made a point of hovering low nearby and filming towards LSCP and I cuddling on the bow with that Big Flag flying over behind us. Her cover is well and truly blown now ! Heh.
These were some of our closest boating neighbours. Really nice folk in "Fuzzy Duck" (far right) and a bunch of Really Big ski-boats rafted next to them ... apparently all friends of their son. They all spent most of the day floating around in arm-chair thingies. I'd hate to think of how their skin looked when they finally got out ... not just because of the "pruning" affect, but also because of the 2stroke oil, etc, that ends up spread through the top 10cm or so of water from all the dirty outboards (guilty, your honour).
Anyway, ya can't spend a day or two on the river and NOT get in ... so here is yours truly running the gauntlet on the "Swan River Whalers" (that's "Bull Sharks" anywhere else in the world ... nasty buggers and they are making a comeback in our waters apparently). Numba1son and I also got into some water fights with lotsa kids and dads on other boats. I put the 8hp on my inflatable/tender which gave me a speed advantage, but I tell you what, they were pretty cunning with the outflanking and balloon artillery. All I had was speed and a bucket ... which was also pretty good for catching what was squirted or flung at ya. Heh. It made things pretty hairy for any to-ing and fro-ing from our pozzie on the river to where the "Big Toy" mentioned earlier was moored, so we had to give up on that particular trip as the day progressed - kinda hard to transport cameras and guitars and keep an LSCP's hair-dry when there are gangs of kids armed with super-soakers, balloon water-bombs, and buckets just waiting for you to take a step off your craft. 
Yeah, the unwritten rule of the river that day was if you left your main boat, you were fair game for a soaking. Great Stuff. Good clean harmless fun ... well, as clean as it can be in a muddy 2stroke soaked river. I should mention that the only water delivery device numba1son had at his disposal was a silly little trigger squirt atomiser used to keep one cool. Sure, it could manage a straight squirt if you twisted the stupid little top on it, but we are talking about a pinhole stream against massive water-guns that could suck up litres of river in one move and eject it 5 metres with another. His comment ? "How emasculating". His battle cry was "I'm a man" as he squeezed the trigger to let fly with his feeble dribble that only managed to wet his own feet. LOL. Never a truer word spoken.
Here is a view of our front row vantage, taken from the tender. Pretty choppy still. Note the plane doing acrobatics to the right. There was A Lot of that stuff going on all afternoon. Everything from squadrons of Bi-planes (pics coming up) to cowboys flying choppers backwards or pin-wheeling across the sky, to water bomber planes and choppers, to sea-planes landing and taking off on the river, to military jets doing the "shock and awe" thing at noisy low altitude. Top Stuff, all of it ! 
Here are but a couple of pics of the Air Stuff on display. No, don't expect any photos of the fireworks ... we were all too busy enjoying the 30min display of some 20,000 shells being ejected into the sky in pleasing arrangements of colour and noise to worry about photographing it.
Okay, there WAS one flag bigger than ours. :) 
... but I had something prettier, closer to mine - and I'm not just talking about that beautiful wooden craft to the left/behind ours. Heh.
Anyway, to any Oz readers, I hope your Oz day was a True Blue and "Ridgy-Didge" as ours was.
... and as the Oz flag flew off into the sunset, numba1son sat quietly contemplating the fact that in but a few days it is "Back to School again". Heh++
regarDS
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