Wild Weather (and an embarrassing anecdote)

Down here in the south of the world it is winter.

Cold wet and (potentially) miserable. Not to be daunted by minor inconveniences like the weather we headed off to the east coast of Victoria.

Not far from Inverloch we paused so I could take some piccies of this abandoned railway trestle bridge.At least abandoned in the sense that it no longer carries a railway. It has been converted to a foot bridge on part of a coastal walk.

Just how close to the coast is shown by this shot under the bridge.
By now the wind was driving a bank of cloud in off Bass Strait. But not all was gloomy, this Callistemon was flowering nearby.
Back in the car we drove along to Venus Bay.

We walked down this path through the coastal heathland to the beach.
I doubt any swimmers would be around to need this sign today.The wind was driving the sea onto the shore and it was now very unpleasant.
But a few hardy individuals were not giving up their fishing for anything.
On the way back up to the car I paused to catch a photo of this beggar (not a good photo I am afraid). A bull ant, these guys are the largest ant in the world. This one was about an inch and a half long.
They are common around Oz, are very aggressive and have a vicious sting.

I had an unfortunate experience with one back in my university days.

Picture if you will Al and Deb making their way along a busy path of the University of New England back in the 1980s. It is a bright sunny day and there are plenty of people around.

All of a sudden Al grabs at his upper thigh and begins dancing around. ‘Something’s in my daks’
Deb looks alarmed, ‘What’s wrong?’
Al continues frantically dancing and clutching at his groin, ‘Ouch, ouch, ouch!’
‘Get your pants off!’
There in the middle of a public thoroughfare Al desperately tears off his jeans.
The culprit: a bull ant.
The little sod got me fourteen times on the upper thigh before I got my pants off.
I reckon these guys are so bad tempered she (the workers of these species are female) probably deliberately climbed all the way up my leg before letting me have it. I am sure she planned public humiliation in addition to the pain.
Anyway back to the main story.

I snapped a few shots of these gnarled roots in the heath. On the way home we stopped at Tarwin Lower near a Jetty on the wetlands.I snapped a few last piccies in the rapidly failing light because by then the moon was out.