Australia - The Mayhem's Blog

Scuba Diving

Before a holiday to Mauritius last year I did my scuba diving open water training, this was so my sister and I could do a few dives whilst we were there. She already had done her training years ago but hadn’t done diving recently.

Since the training i have got a bit hooked and have kept on heading down to Rye on the Mornington Peninsula and diving regularly in Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. Recently i also passed my Advanced diver so i can go up to 30m depth. The guys at The Scuba Dive Shop (aka Scuba Doctor) have been fantastic and are always holding courses, club dives and boat dive that i have been joining.

Below are highlight videos from a number of the dives so far in reverse order, i’ll add future videos in new posts and also add to this YouTube playlist: Scuba Diving playlist

Planned boat dive ended up being changed to a fairly poor visibility uneventful drift dive, although i hadn’t done a drift dive before so it was something different. The boat skipper took us to a Chinaman’s Hat platform for a quick swim with the Fur Seals that hangout there.
We still had some air left after the drift dive so did a quick 30 mins under Portsea Pier.

I did calls these Fur Seals Sea Lions originally – apparently Fur Seals are more closely related to Sea Lions that seals and look most like Sea Lions – they are their own sub species of sea lions but called seal to be confusing.

Building Home Climbing Wall

I’ve always like the idea of having a home climbing/bouldering wall and since we got this place i always said that an old bar nook would be a good place for one. I took the old bar out not long after we moved in when i built the new one and the nook has just been a junk storage place since.

More Telescoping

After one of Michelle’s colleagues saw some of the telescope photos that i had taken he offered us his telescope he had had for a long time but not ended up using. This telescope is a refactor telescope with lenses rather than mirrors so is generally better at solar system planet viewing than deep space, the tracking makes it easier to take pictures though.

Loch Trip

The final part of our postponed Gippsland road trip was to a small town called Loch. We were finally able to stay there last weekend just for one night but it was all that was really needed.

City Staycation

To encourage people back into the city now that things are opening up after Covid lockdowns a lot of hotels are doing 2 for 1 deals, as the Melbourne Comedy Festival was also taking place we took advantage of one of these deals and did some touristy things too.

Inverloch and Baw Baw

Following a 5 day lockdown in Victoria that meant we had to cancel the second half of our Lakes Entrance holiday we managed to move the dates to last week. I also had a pre-planned cycle ride from Noojee up Baw Baw climb so we combined both with Michelle picking me up from Noojee and then we continued down to the coastal town of Inverloch.

Lakes Entrance (I jinxed it)

So i think i may have jinxed this in my previous A bit of An Update post when mentioning things Conona wise were going well in Australia/Victoria….we’re now in a 5 day “circuit breaker” lockdown limited to going out of essentials and 2hrs of exercise within 5km of home. Unfortunately it meant we had to cut our holiday short, we were on a boat trip in the lakes around Lakes Entrance when we found out about the statewide lockdown.

Dirty Donna Gravel Ride

I had a few days off this week so like a completely normal person I decided to go for a long cycle ride! I have had the gravel ride up the back of Donna Buang on my hit-list for a while but hadn’t managed to fit in the time to do it so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. It was a lovely day and with the whole route being on trails and back roads there was no need to get up early so i got a bit of a lie in too.

A bit of an Update

It has been a very long time since writing something up on here so thought I’d add this brief post so any friends and family that read this know all is going well. I’ll probably follow up with a post about a few other things too.

Bar Build

When we moved into our new house we did have a 70’s style built in bar but it was in a bit of a corner and not really in a particularly “appealing style”.

I decided to build a bar myself rather than trying to find an off the shelf style that fitted the room and our budget. I did watch a YouTube video to get a design idea but didn’t really like it so just decided to go ahead and design and build from scratch.