Captain's Log.

Sometimes I just have to laugh at irony's effect on human life. There's nothing else left to do but smile. Golden Bay Western Australia is a picture postcard place. It's a stretch of around 15kms of sapphire blue ocean meeting rolling dunes. It's natural and untouched. No one in Golden Bay wants to see the dunes flattened by a new developer's plans to put a couple of thousand houses on it. Once that happens, the postcard look will be gone. The irony is that most of the placards placed around the Golden Bay area are on properties built in Golden Bay 20-40 years ago. These homes were taking bites out of the dunes long before someone got offended by it. Animals are today's bargaining item. Mass destruction means mass execution - a matter that leans on greater losses over shorter times. Forget that animals were lost when their homes, roads, highways, power, sewage went in. Death and destruction is totally different now. Irony continues as t

Just looking for an address in Raby Bay, Cleveland for which to focus my next murder story. And I think I've found one! It needed to be on the water - a canal estate. It had to have good water access to Moreton Bay. It needed a berth large enough in which to moor one motherstuffin' sized catamaran. Now I need to write me a hot lady skipper to captain this yacht. She needs to be a doctor and has the credentials to perform surgery on the boat. She'll be a stunning woman, a fertility specialist with an exemplary record of  turning childless couples into parents... but she also has a dark secret. That's all for now. Stay tuned - M

Deaths at music festivals are on the increase. It's sad but this week another innocent teen died at the hands of an accidental overdose. It's occurred three times in the last month. Now's there's a debate about testing the drugs distributed at musical festivals. If you read the tweets and listen to the traditional media on this topic, it'll have us believing the general consensus is that pill testing should take place at every musical festival - to find out what's exactly inside the concoctions that are illegally dispensed to young Aussies before they swallow and then become victims. What has happened to this world? Why are we at the point of debating of testing pills? When I was younger, I was taught not to put foreign things into my body. Don't do it. The message was clear. The extension to that was 'Don't accept anything from strangers.' It was so simple. DON'T DO IT. Each of us are responsible for OUR own mistakes, not s

Moreton Bay brings many sights and sounds to the eyes and ears of a sailor. During my time on the olive green liquid in the middle bay I saw turtles, dugong, dolphins and such on a regular basis. I have fond memories of everything I did on the water but the one thing that has stayed with me is a sound - the sound of dry, lonely wind wailing through a she-oak tree. She-oaks in Sandgate. They line the coast everywhere. In a light wind they softly pine. At night they whimper from the darkness. When you're alone and anchored near an island covered with them, they whisper their despair openly and endlessley. Only the sounds of cold water lapping on the hull accompany their tears, your tears, my tears. Setting sail out of Manly for the first time was scary. I'd never sailed before. I raised the sail and air quickly filled it, tipping the boat, making the water whoosh around one side of the hull. It lurched forward, leaning further and I thought the boat would tip over.