tomandzoe.com - live from the northside

I spent most of Australia day out on Will’s new boat with Will and Paul (my office-mate). We went ‘fishing’, but, given that we’re such ashamedly bad fishermen (especially for freshwater fish ecologists), we’ve decided to refer to this activity as ‘boating’. We headed out of the mouth of the Bohle River, just north of Townsville, which has had some nice flow recently with all the rain we’ve been getting (in some places up here it’s rained more than 500mm in a week). But, it wasn’t (read - never is) an original idea, especially on Australia Day. I imagine the fish are saying “so you think you’ll drift out with the tide tossing lures amongst the mangroves - nice original idea - losers!”.

Soon enough we gave up and I convinced a hesitant Will that it would be a good idea to give his boat a bit of a run offshore. “Lets head out to Rattlesnake (Island, where the Airforce does it’s bombing practice), it’s only 20 minutes away”. Twenty minutes later we were less than half way there. We decided to stop and ‘bottom-bash’ (this is an activity reserved for a small boat with three guys in it ;), but with no luck.

Here’s a shot of Will chilling off-shore.

We headed back to land into a nasty chop (it was one of the few days of the year when there’s a westerly breeze blowing), getting soaked and pounded all the way.

Paul and I then had to rush home for a shower and head out to Indoor Cricket (so Aussie). I won the toss and sent the team into bat (how I became captain - who knows?). If you haven’t played indoor cricket this is how it goes. Each team consists of 8 players who bat in pairs, for 4 overs each. Each bowler bowls 2 overs - totalling 16 overs. Scoring runs is done by running between the wickets in combination with hitting the side nets with the ball. For e.g. the back net on the full is a 6. If you get out, you lose 5 runs but keep batting for the 4 overs. In this way a batting pair can get a negative score.

Anyway… we’ve got some nice opening battsmen, but an unpredictable middle order. As the team consists of baseballers, we’re pretty good at long range run-outs, but not very good at other things. Bowling, for example. The openers scored about 55, then the second pair (consisting of the brothers Elcoate) scored an impressive 1, Paul and I managed about 40, before our final pair tore the innings apart with a total of -20! Leaving us to defend a total of ~75. We managed to bowl and field really well, and kept them to a measly 45 for the whole innings (200 is a more usual score) taking the win! This leaves us in first or second on the table heading in the finals in February.

Needless to say, I’m a little tired today.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 27th, 2005 at 9:45 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.