Poona

Rain, rain, rain is all it’s seemed to do sine we arrived in Poona 4 days ago. It’s about 40ks outside Maryborough and quite a nice little place but we haven’t seen much of it with the rain. The good thing is the lack of sand flies due to the cooler weather-that really is great. We’ve been pretty bothered by them and have a huge selection of sprays, roll-ons and home made remedies in the hope that something works. When we went to Maryborough tourist information centre looking for directions, we were asked why we would want to come here and then told to be careful of the sand flies-after all the places we’ve been fighting them off, this seems no worse than anywhere else!

I bought a very expensive tube of Bushman’s repellant only to find I stuck to the seat I use in the boat (and it felt like waxing my leg to get it off) and all the plastic parts on our fishing rods we’ve touched have gone tacky. It can’t be nice stuff!

The park is here is small and mostly empty which is nice. We’ve actually had one whole side of the place to ourselves and have really spread out under the big shady trees. I hated the first couple of days though as the lawns were in desperate need of a mow and the shrubs needed attacking with a machete to get through to the toilets and laundry. I was happy to come back from a drive to Maryborough yesterday and find the owner had done it!

We did manage to get out to fish yesterday morning (up at 6 am to do it though) and were very happy when Russ caught us a metre long gummy shark and a large flounder. The shark has given us quite a few feeds of one of my favourite fish. It was great fun bringing it into the boat with our very light gear. Poona is on the Great Sandy Straight so is only 4ks across the water from Fraser Island. We’d been hoping we could take the boat over but the weather really has been against us, so we might have to do it next time round.

After we’d been fishing, we showered then headed into Maryborough for lunch and a visit with one of the women Riki that I’ve met through the recipe club Recipezaar. We’d never met in person before but had a great time. On Saturday we are leaving here and taking the van to her place for two nights before we move on to Trewantin near Noosa for another week. It’ll be lovely to spend some time with Riki.

This morning we took a drive to Tin Can Bay. It’s another pretty spot, but it was too wet still to get out and look round much. I was surprised at the extent of the pine forests around here-we passed through about 40ks of them on the way here.