Riscy and I are on holiday.  We will be visiting family then kayaking for a week south west Tasmania.  We will be back at the end of February.

I have packed some books including Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit... actually I'm half way through it, I am enjoying it and there are definitely some things so far which I would like to try to help me improve my productivity and focus.  I've also got my ideas book and my new journal too :-)

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Every year the big printmaking suppliers have paper sales.  I buy. 

Yet, I rarely work on paper.  I have visions of copious charcoal drawings, little handbound journals, big sprawling pen and watercolour drawings, intricate linocuts and, that somehow, I will instantly become a printmaker and start cranking out etchings.  So far I none of these things has happened.

Now, of course the biggest issue I have is storage of all this beautiful paper.  It is all big sheets and very awkward to store and then access.  It currently lives under the spare bed where it is almost impossible to get at.  I also have a big roll of drawing paper which I can't work with because I can't figure out how to stop it from curling.

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This year I also bought some hard bound journals made by Hahnemuhle.  I have been staring blankly at them since the New Year.  I have even carted them around with be on occasion hoping the 'will to draw' would strike. 

Last night, I was tired and somehow my resistance was down.  I just grabbed one of the journals (square format, black cover) and started gessoing the paper.  Then I roughly drew some stuff on my desk then I coloured my drawings with paint.  I love to rub the paint back and layer more paint and rub and scratch to see what happens.  Unfortunately the painting on Page 2 was much better before I started doing that.

So, it seems I have started a new journal :-)

Here are some links I have found recently:

Posie gets Cozy - A wonderful writing style and heaps of creativity and 'making stuff' (my favrouite thing!)

The Flickr of Brian Raszka - Check out this guy's collages.  Now this is where my 'yet unconcieved' sprawling drawings should be going.

I got the above link from Dear Ada - a great art and design link source.

A Tasmanian printmaker Simone Pfister - It is times like these I wish I REALLY did have magical etching skills.  Link from Linden Langdon.

Our kayaking/camping weekend was wonderful.  Even if our navigation skills are terrible... we were meant to camping on Snake Island.

 

Wilsons Promontory, Corner Inlet and the Snakes. 

 

You see, I gave the map to Riscy then he asked me where we were headed and I pointed to the headland directly visible behind Little Snake Island (the moment of blunder)  So we paddled there.  It was pretty rough.  We don't have spray decks yet.  I copped a lot of water... sorta like the figurehead ladies at the front of those old boats... except I had to paddle (and bail out water).

We got there and decided it was too late to find our campsite which we figured would be at least another hour given our progress so far.  I kept on apologising to Riscy, because I couldn't believe it had taken us so long to get there.  Snake Island seemed alot more mountainous than I thought it would be.  I had expected a low lying mangrove and mudflat surrounded island; a place where they actually ford cattle to in low tide.  I couldn't work it out.  The water we had paddled across was DEEP.  Very Deep.

We had spotted a beach about 1/2 an hour's paddle away and decided to check it out to possibly camp the night.  

Luckily we found paradise. 

A white sanded, deserted beach with a little sheltered nook at the base of a granite mountain.  Riscy cooked us up a wondrous beef curry and later we strolled along the beach with the glorious, purple sunset behind us and the full, juicy moon rising in front of us.

A little green yacht motored into our cove overnight, carrying a yoga lady and her speedo husband.  They kindy infomed us that the next day (Sunday) was going to be 38DegC (100F) with a 25-30knot NorthEasterly.  That worried us a little.  The channel was pretty rough, especially when the tides were running in or out.  So we planned to leave early to beat the wind and catch the in coming tide.

But that day (Saturday) we wanted to check out the eastern side of this island to try and match our map with our surroundings (without success, it didn't make sense at all) and also to try out our new fishing rod. 

Given the hundreds of flathead we had seen in the shallows around Little Snake Island, I had high hopes.  But no luck.  We paddled a lot, tried to catch some fish, and then decided to head back to paradise for a late lunch.  We got lazy in the afternoon and retreated from the march flys into our tent and read the books we had packed.  I was reading Cloudstreet by my 'favourite author to read when camping', Tim Winton.  My idea of bliss.  Later that afternoon, Riscy tried to catch some fish and I climbed the green and pink lichen splattered granite boulders behind our campsite to take in the view.  I was pretty confused because I couldn't see the channel between 'Snake Island' and Wilsons Prom.  And I didn't see any snakes.

That night Riscy cooked us up a feast of canned tuna and tomato pasta with grated parmesan, for desert we ate canned peaches. Yummo... although flathead would have been nice too.

The next day we packed up our site and then packed up our kayak.... well acutally I ran as gopher and Riscy => the master packer, packed.  It already looked rough out on the channel.  We had decided to paddle down and cross at the shortest crossing of the channel.  We paddled like the dickens, at times the swell was over our heads, which wouldn't be so bad, but without spray decks, it was pretty tricky.  It took us about 3/4 hour to cross the channel.

When we had a breather we looked back and I said to Riscy " I think we just camped on Wilsons Prom.  We were on the top of the hooky bit"  Riscy got the map out of his pocket and all of a sudden it made sense.  We had actually paddled towards Mt Singapore on the first day across the 'Singapore Deep' channel.  Doh.  How stupid! (it was a 12-13km paddle there on the first day)

 

We had the current with us on the way up the real Snake Island and tried again to catch flathead in the shallows around Little Snake Island.  We were paddling less than 1m over the bloody things and yet we couldn't catch 'em.  It would have been more effective to just whack the things with my paddle.

Then the wind really kicked in when we rounded the point on Little Snake Island.  It was a terrible hard slog into a harsh head wind all the way back to Port Welshpool.  It seemed to take us a million years to get back.  We beached about 1/2 a kilometre from our car, when I tried to get out of the kayak by legs gave up an I keeled over in a very ungraceful manner into the water.

An old bloke, with one leg gave Riscy a lift back to our car (he knew which car, I think he watches boat traffic all day and had seen us leave on Friday), and I unpacked the kayak and ferried our stuff up onto the foreshore.  We loaded up the car, lifted the kayak on top and drove a couple hundred metres down the road to buy some fish'n'chips.  I had flathead.

Other highlights which I did not have space to include in the story:

*We got up close and personal with a stingray when wading along the shore, I'm sure it would have come right up to us but I spooked and scared it away. 

*We had a 'free form' beehive hanging off a fallen, gnarled, bansia tree behind our campsite. We think they were european bees because they had the classic beeswax honey comb thing happening.

* We found out today that the 'rough stuff' we encountered on our first day is an area called 'five ways' a junction of 5 channels which can be very, very treacherous.  We have learnt alot. 

Things we will not kayak without again: Spraydecks.  And GPS.  And a Camera.