Rag-Doll
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Posts posted by Rag-Doll
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Oh dear, I 've just sent an email to NOASC asking them about a tour up Yotei in a couple of weeks. I've had good experiences with these guys in the past, but this does make me wonder.
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As one survivor describes it...
THEY warn you it comes fast. But the word "fast" doesn't come anywhere near describing it.
It comes at you like a runaway train. One minute you are preparing. The next you are fighting for your home. Then you are fighting for your life.
But it is not minutes that come between. It's more like seconds. The firestorm moves faster than you can think, let alone react.
For 25 years, we had lived on our hilltop in St Andrews, in the hills northeast of Melbourne.
You prepare like they tell you every summer.
You clear. You slash. You prime your fire pump. For 25 years, fires were something that you watched in the distance.
Until Saturday.
We had been watching the massive plume of smoke from the fire near Kilmore all afternoon; secure in the knowledge it was too far away to pose a danger.
Then suddenly there is smoke and flames across the valley, about a kilometre to the northwest, being driven towards you by the wind. Not too bad, you think.
I rush around the side of the house to start the petrol-powered fire pump to begin spraying the house, just in case.
When I get there, I suddenly see flames rushing towards the house from the west. The tongues of flame are in our front paddock, racing up the hill towards us across grass stubble I thought safe because it had been slashed.
In the seconds it takes me to register the flames, they are into a small stand of trees 50m from the house. Heat and embers drive at me like an open blast furnace. I run to shelter inside, like they tell you, until the fire front passes.
Inside are my wife, a 13-year-old girl we care for, and a menagerie of animals "rescued" over the year by our veterinary-student daughter.
They call it "ember attack". Those words don't do it justice.
It is a fiery hailstorm from hell driving relentlessly at you. The wind and driving embers explore, like claws of a predator, every tiny gap in the house. Embers are blowing through the cracks around the closed doors and windows.
We frantically wipe at them with wet towels. We are fighting for all we own. We still have hope.
The house begins to fill with smoke. The smoke alarms start to scream. The smoke gets thicker.
I go outside to see if the fire front has passed. One of our two cars under a carport is burning. I rush inside to get keys for the second and reverse it out into an open area in front of the house to save it.
That simple act will save our lives. I rush back around the side of the house, where plastic plant pots are in flames. I turn on a garden hose. Nothing comes out.
I look back along its length and see where the flames have melted it. I try to pick up one of the carefully positioned plastic buckets of water I've left around the house. Its metal handle pulls away from the melted sides.
I rush back inside the house. The smoke is much thicker. I see flames behind the louvres of a door into a storage room, off the kitchen. I open the door and there is a fire burning fiercely.
I realise the house is gone. We are now fighting for our lives.
We retreat to the last room in the house, at the end of the building furthest from where the firestorm hit. We slam the door, shutting the room off from the rest of the house. The room is quickly filling with smoke. It's black, toxic smoke, different from the superheated smoke outside.
We start coughing and gasping for air. Life is rapidly beginning to narrow to a grim, but inevitable choice. Die from the toxic smoke inside. Die from the firestorm outside.
The room we are in has french doors opening on to the front veranda. Somewhere out of the chaos of thoughts surfaces recent media bushfire training I had done with the CFA. When there's nothing else, a car might save you.
I run the 30 or 40 steps to the car through the blast furnace. I wrench open the door to start the engine and turn on the airconditioning, as the CFA tells you, before going back for the others.
The key isn't in the ignition. Where in hell did I put it? I rush back to the house. By now the black, toxic smoke is so thick I can barely see the others. Everyone is coughing. Gasping. Choking. My wife is calling for one of our two small dogs, the gentle, loyal Gizmo, who has fled in terror.
I grope in my wife's handbag for her set of car keys. The smoke is so thick I can't see far enough to look into the bag. I find them by touch, thanks to a plastic spider key chain our daughter gave her as a joke. Our lives are saved by a plastic spider. I tell my wife time has run out. We have to get to the car. The choices have narrowed to just one option, just one slim chance to live.
Clutching the second of our two small dogs, we run to the car. I feel the radiant heat burning the back of my hand. The CFA training comes back again. Radiant heat kills.
The three of us are inside the car. I turn the key. It starts. We turn on the airconditioning and I reverse a little further away from the burning building. The flames are wrapped around the full fuel tank of the other car and I worry about it exploding.
We watch our home - our lives, everything we own - blazing fiercely just metres away. The heat builds. We try to drive down our driveway, but fallen branches block the way. I reverse back towards the house, but my wife warns me about sheets of red-hot roofing metal blowing towards us.
I drive back down, pushing the car through the branches. Further down the 400m drive, the flames have passed. But at the bottom, trees are burning.
We sit in the open, motor running and airconditioner turned on full. Behind us our home is aflame. We calmly watch from our hilltop, trapped in the sanctuary of our car, as first the house of one neighbour, then another, then another goes up in flames. One takes an agonisingly slow time to go, as the flames take a tenuous grip at one end and work their way slowly along the roof. Another at the bottom of our hill, more than a 100 years old and made of imported North American timber, explodes quickly in a plume of dark smoke.
All the while the car is being buffeted and battered by gale-force winds and bombarded by a hail of blackened material. It sounds like rocks hitting the car.
The house of our nearest neighbour, David, who owns a vineyard, has so far escaped. But a portable office attached to one wall is billowing smoke.
I leave the safety of the car and cross the fence. Where is the CFA, he frantically asks. With the CFA's help, perhaps he can save his house. What's their number, he asks me. I tell him we had already rung 000, before our own house burnt. Too many fires. Too few tankers. I leave him to his torment. I walk back towards our own house in a forlorn hope that by some miracle our missing dog may have survived in some unburned corner of the building.
Our home, everything we were, is a burning, twisted, blackened jumble. Our missing dog, Gizmo, Bobby our grumpy cockatoo, Zena the rescued galah that spoke Greek and imitated my whistle to call the dogs, our free-flying budgie nicknamed Lucky because he escaped a previous bushfire, are all gone. Killed in theinferno that almost claimed us as well.
I return to the car and spot the flashing lights of a CFA tanker through the blackened trees across the road. We drive down the freeway, I pull clear more fallen branches and we reach the main road. I walk across the road to the tanker and tell them if they are quick they might help David save his house. I still don't know if they did. We stop at a police checkpoint down the hill. They ask us where we've come from and what's happening up the road. I tell them there's no longer anything up the road.
We stop at the local CFA station in St Andrews. Two figures sit hunched in chairs, covered by wet towels for their serious burns. More neighbours. We hear that an old friend, two properties from us, is missing. A nurse wraps wet towels around superficial burns on my wife's leg and my hand.
We drive to my brother's house, which fate had spared, on the other side of St Andrews.
The thought occurs to me, where do you start when you've lost everything, even a way to identify yourself. Then I realise, of course, it doesn't matter. We escaped with our lives. Just. So many others didn't.
Gary Hughes is a senior writer for The Australian
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The initial response in this day and age of information overload and mobility is to really question how anybody could get caught in the fire, with an understandable, but perhaps unkind view that the people involved were at least partly responsible for putting themselves in harm's way. This article from the Australian provides a bit more insight into why people were caught in the fire...
WHEN bushfires turn lethal, the terror begins long before the burning embers and flames arrive, and the sky glows orange in the heat.
At their most hellish, these firestorms are like a giant runaway train: out of control, all but unstoppable, indiscriminately destructive. They move so fast that any poor soul fleeing at the last minute risks being engulfed.
The only saving grace is they don't happen more frequently in this great, sunburnt land.
But tell that to the loved ones of the 12 people who died on Black Saturday in Victoria around the mountain hamlet of Kinglake.
Or to the families of the four victims in StAndrews, the once-leafy enclave north of Melbourne where this newspaper's Gary Hughes only just got himself and his family away as their home of 25 years burned around them. And to the black-faced, bone-weary fire crews who were searching for bodies in the charred ruins of devastated Marysville or in the destroyed homesteads dotted around the Bunyip State Forest, east of the Victorian capital, where a conflagration came roaring out of the trees on Saturday night, defying every effort to stop it.
The overall death toll was 76 last night, with the potential to rise further, as authorities warned they still did not have a complete picture of who was caught in the fires that ripped through a deadly arc north and east of Melbourne, in the worst such disaster to strike since the Ash Wednesday outbreaks nearly 26 years ago.
The scars of that disaster on February 16, 1983, which claimed 47 lives in Victoria and another 28 in South Australia, remain raw and led to an overhaul of firefighting practices as well as better engagement with householders to battle bushfires. Central to this was the concept of fight or flight: people in vulnerable areas were encouraged to prepare fire plans on how to evacuate or defend their property when bushfire threatened.
The key was to make the choice early: if the decision was to go, they were told to hit the road well in advance of the flames.
One of the lessons of Ash Wednesday was that people could protect their homes and survive if they did the required preparation. Gutters, combustibles in the yard and overhanging foliage needed to be cleared. When the time came, hoses were to be set up, sinks and tubs filled with water to damp down spot fires ahead, and after the passage of the front.
The worst option, firefighters emphasised, was to be semi-committed: if a bushfire bore down there would be no halfway house for vacillators: to flee then was to risk death.
"There has been over 30 years of debate among fire experts as to whether people should stay and defend their property or leave early when there is a real risk of bushfire approaching," says Robert Heath, a psychologist and crisis management expert at the University of South Australia.
"Personally, my feeling is that most people should evacuate in the case of mega-fires - that is, when you have multiple spotting of fires ahead of a large firefront."
Authorities put increased emphasis on aerial suppression of firefronts, especially with the giant sky crane helicopters that are now a fixture of summer bushfire fighting in Australia. However, it made little difference during those fatal hours on Saturday night in Victoria. Why? In this case, the threat was known and emergency services were mobilised. The change in weather conditions that sparked the emergency had been predicted well in advance.
History provides a guide. It's no accident that mega-fires, once started, turn into infernos that defeat the heroics of firefighters and claim lives. In the lead-up to Ash Wednesday in 1983, Victoria had endured 10 months of drought; the warning signs had been apparent for months after a total fire ban was declared across the state the previous November, until then the earliest in the fire season such a measure had been imposed. On the day itself, Wednesday, February 16, 1983, the temperature soared to over 40C while relative humidity dropped to 15 per cent.
Fast-forward to Saturday. Melbourne baked in record 46.5C heat as northerly winds drew in blistering air from the deserts of central Australia. It was even hotter outside the city: in the paddocks around Avalon, the mercury had hit 47.9C by mid-afternoon.
Relief was to have been brought to the city by a cooling wind change but, as in 1983, this proved to be a hydra-headed monster for those in the fire zone. The temperature, after dipping in Melbourne, began to rise again as bushfires took hold on its northern outskirts. A smoke haze drifted across the city, imparting a sense of surreality to the unfolding emergency.
To put the threat in perspective, the forest fire danger index for the Adelaide Hills on Saturday was 111, against 50 for Ash Wednesday. The South Australian capital got off lightly when the temperature topped out at a relatively moderate 41C on Saturday, and because the cool change that came through in the early afternoon did not pack the punch of the wind shift that blasted into Victoria a few hours later.
That turned the prevailing wind direction from the north to southwesterly outside Melbourne, pushing the flames east, on to the Kinglake area, Marysville and St Andrews. In east Gippsland, the fires in the Bunyip forest burst through containment lines. In many cases, there was little firefighters could do except save themselves.
Questions are sure to be asked about whether more could have been done to warn communities in danger. Inquiries have inevitably followed bushfire disasters and this one in Victoria will be no exception.
The parallels between Black Saturday, 2009, and Ash Wednesday can be traced further along the timeline. It's no coincidence the heat records broken in Victoria over the weekend had stood since January 1939, when the Black Friday fires killed 71 people in logging communities in the state's high country (on the day of the Black Friday outbreaks, the temperature topped 45.6C in Melbourne).
A subsequent royal commission blamed the careless use of campfires and land clearing; supervised burning techniques that endure today were subsequently developed.
The 2003 Canberra fires, which killed four, raised searching questions about co-operation between the ACT and NSW fire authorities and whether more could have been done to have stopped the inferno before it broke into the national capital.
The inquiry recommended increased emphasis on controlled burning as a fuel-reduction strategy in national parks, and improvements to training for volunteer and fire crews. Crucially, more emphasis was to be placed on informing the public of emerging bushfire threats, especially in urban areas.
After the Eyre Peninsula disaster in South Australia in January 2005 claimed nine lives, a coroner found that fire authorities had wrongly assumed the deadly blaze had been contained, resulting in a crucial delay in issuing warnings.
But Victorian fire authorities insist no amount of preparation could have coped with the deadly conditions on late Saturday. "You couldn't fight it, nobody could," one tearful survivor says.
"It rained fire," says another.
Raylene Kincaide of Narbethong, near devastated Marysville, northeast of Melbourne, thought she would never go through another bushfire as bad as Ash Wednesday, but this was worse. "Everyone we know has lost everything they had," she says.
The term mega-fire was coined in the US, but fire experts say Australians may need to get used to it. Rod Incoll, a fire management consultant who was formerly a chief fire office responsible for Victoria's state forests and national parks, says such blazes go off "like a nuclear release ... you're talking about megawatts of energy".
As was the case on Saturday, these are typically formed by several fires, covering a huge area, converging. They exhibit complex behaviour, create their own weather and burn on and on, brushing aside the most intense and sophisticated efforts to contain them.
Kevin O'Loughlin of the Bushfire Co-operative Research Centre points out that the worst fires in recorded history in the US have occurred in the past decade, and Australia is likely to be no exception as the drought drags on in the southern half of the continent. There, lower rainfall and higher temperatures associated with global warming threaten to intensify the bushfire menace.
The scenes described by survivors of the Black Saturday blazes in Victoria are salutary. As the firefront approached, the sky blackened. Spotfires broke out as blazing embers fell from the heavens. The heat intensified and a blistering wind, whipped up by the change of air pressure caused by the fire sucking in oxygen, sounded like a "freight train", according to one account.
"Most people are not psychologically prepared for the noise and heat of a mega-fire," Heath warns.
Phil Cheney, an honorary research scientist with the CSIRO, says the tips of flames in a firestorm burn at 300C, while at the base of the fire the temperature can climb to 1000C. Radiant heat reaches out to kill long before the fire itself arrives.
Incoll fears that there is only so much fire crews can do in the face of a monster conflagration. "The fuel loads are so high because there has been no strategic burning done," he prophetically told The Australian in December 2006. "Those large fires just get going and once they get going you can't stop them because the fire intensity, the heat generated by the fire, exceeds the fairly puny efforts that human intervention can exert."
University of Tasmania bushfire management expert David Bowman agrees. "This is a truly terrible situation," he says.
And let's not forget something else: this hot, dry summer in southeastern Australia still has a long way to go. South Australia and Tasmania are tinderboxes, and NSW is feeling the heat, too.
There may be more black days to come.
Jamie Walker is The Australian's Adelaide bureau chief.
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Aust has always had periods of intense heat, records that are being broken are in some cases many years and decades old. That said, some climate guy I read recently was saying that record breaking episodes of extreme heat and cold have always happened, but recently they happen more frequently for heat than cold on something like a 3 to 1 ratio. and there are the fires....just incredible what has happened down around kinglake and maryville.
Imagine, you've done the right thing, you've got the fire plan in place, you've clered the bush away from your house, filled your gutter with water etc. the fire is miles away and then the chnage come through and brings cool weather but with it, the fire becomes super charged and changes direction - suddenly the stay and fight approach is suicide so you bundle the wife and kids into the car and head off down the road in white out/black out conditions. you can't see a thing, cars are running off the road, running into each other, buildings and tree and cars are busting into flames...what it must have been like when they realised they couldn't get out.
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[quote=Ryoma
The tap beer is called "nama" and is more expensive due to the hops/barley content. A lot of the canned beer has corn, potato etc (the ingredients are written on the side).
Ryoma is referring to happoshu which is a low malt (low quality) beer intended to get uni students drunk and to get around certain taxes. It used to make the beer a lot cheaper than normal beer but I think the tax laws have change so its not that much cheaper now. Your standard apre binge beer in a can like kirin, asahi, sapporo etc are normal beers and will cost normal prices and, being canned beer from a conbi or vending machine, don't usually come served by a friendly Japanese girl working in Niseko during the winter to improve her English, like nama beer often is. Sometimes is pays to pay more
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yeah, it is fair enough.
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[quote=JA ie, the ticket costs, say, USD1450 and that includes a total mass of the traveller and their luggage of, say 150kg. That means that someone who is 90kg wringing wet would have an allowance of 60kg luggage and the 120kg monster would be allowed 30kg.
I had to chuckle at this JA - not many 90kg guys would be considered light or small. Anybody under 6ft who weighs 90kg is going to be carrying a few extra kgs and will probably take up more than his fair share of space. And Monsters have rights too, you know! What about overweight vampires and werewolves? Shouldn't they have to pay extra as well, or do you just have it in for monsters for all those years they hid under your bed?
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It will be interesting to see how the property thing plays out. Will people hold or try to off load? The locals who have watched how the place has developed in the last 5 years must be thinking I told you so! Buying in at a premium only to have the market turn means an investor could be holding for quite a few years before the market comes back. The people who really must be kicking themselves are the locals who bought during the Japanese property bubble and held on for too long during this boom and now have missed the chance to cash in.
I think everyone is surprised at just how quickly the global economy is unravelling.
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Well if no one else is going to start this thread I might as well.
so, the gang is back this year but with a new judge who is pretty easy on the eye, but seems like she would be a complete bitch.
Maybe this has been obvious to everyone for ages, but it has only just occurred to me - the people who are obviously crushed by being laughed at or turned down by the judges are actually treated pretty poorly. They've probably turned up thinking they don't really have much of a chance, but are having a go any way. Because they're a little deluded and are sufficiently oddball enough to make good TV they get through the preliminary rounds. It takes all day so they're thinking, hey, I just might have chance at this. And on it goes until they get to the pannel and it turns out that they're there for the joke factor. They've seen the show they know how it goes down. All day thinking, wow I'm in with a chance and then with the cameras and the starts and etc. they get hit with the punch line - you're a joke! Not very nice at all. Of course there are some people who are genuinely deluded but not all of them.
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It isn't a great season though is it?
And the J-crowds are a fickle bunch; too much snow or too little snow and they're off to akihabara.
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Originally Posted By: Tubby BeaverAkibun, when it comes to politics, the UK is a weird place. The UK is made up of 3 major countries (Scotland, England, Wales) and a province(Northern Ireland). The channel islands, like the Isle of Man are not actually part of the UK but are a Crown dependency, in that the British government is ultimately responsible for them.
The strange thing about the UK is that outside of Politics, in the mind of its people, it isn't really 1 country. Each member country retains its own national identity that sets it apart from the others, with its own unique culture, traditions and language. The most common mistake that most non-UK people make is assuming the the UK = England, when in fact England is but 1 of the parts that make up the UK.
Ah! The good old days of conquest and empire. Life must have been much easier when you could march over the hill and subjugate the bloke next door. Problematic neighbors could be easily dealt with by exterminating the male population and, ahem, appropriating the female population and no messy UN or Human rights issues to deal with. I'm sure there are a few local disputes going on around the world right now that would be sorted out quick smart if people could get medieval with each other.
RENTON from Trainspotting has a great take on being part of the UK: I hate being Scottish. We're the lowest of the **** low, the scum of the earth, the most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat into civilization. Some people hate the English, but I don't. They're just wankers. We, on the other hand, are colonized by wankers. We can't even pick a decent culture to be colonized by. We are ruled by effete arseholes. It's a shite state of affairs and all the fresh air in the world will not make any **** difference. -
Weekdays were always really quiet. So quiet that it felt a little spooky.
Given the economic news coming out of Japan these days, there will probably be stiff competition for liftie jobs and no one on the slopes in the coming seasons. It looks pretty grim.
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rather than feeling disgust i reckon people ought to consider it from that guy's point of view. he has probably spent years trying to come to grips with what he wants to do v what society (esp Japaneses society) expects him to do. He would be well aware of the disgust some people have for his lifestyle and at some level he might even feel ashamed himself for feeling the need to dress a certain way. For all that the guy is a (big) bit off the beam, good on him for getting out there.
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Originally Posted By: Go NativeBest thing about bangin a tranny? When you reach around it feels like you've gone all the way through!
(um can I say that on here?)
don't know, but glad you did. a laugh out loud post
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niiiiiice!
On a good day Nozawa is as good as any place in Japan I reckon. The flats are flat but early runs on the front slopes at full tilt can give you genki for the whole day. I wish I could have spent more time exploring it. There looks to be a nice off piste run from the top (looker's right) down through the trees to the board park area. I've never done it though, but it looks doable.
Muika,
How close (as the crow flies) is Naeba to Nozawa? I have this idea that they're miles from each other?
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Originally Posted By: gareth_oauI'm honestly quite amazed that Bush was the best that the republicans could come up with? It really does demonstrate that money talks
less about money and more about the numbers and motivation of the gun totting bible bashing right wing loons in Jesusland I reckon. The really scary thing is that they voted for Bush twice! Once is, ok, one never really knows but twice! I guess if you're the kind of person who still believes in creation in the face of over whelming evidence then it is going to take a while to realise that the guy you've voted in is a knucklehead.
Hi CB - its an oldie but a goodie. -
There have been some really interesting articles being written about Obama and Bush, the potential of one and the legacy of the other and a lot about the way the left treat and regard their heroes compared to the treatment of those on the right. Seems lefties are able to forgive and forget, but history is somewhat less kind to those on the right. I reckon even with the overly hyped expectations and the potential for disappointment that that invariably brings, Obama could do a Denis Leary and still be loved:
....You know what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna get myself a 1967 Cadilac El Dorado Convertable
Hot pink!
With whale skin hub caps
An all leather cow interior
And big brown baby seal eyes for headlights
YEAH!
And I'm gonna drive around in that baby
At 115 miles per hour
Getting one mile per gallon
Sucking down Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers from McDonalds in the old-fashioned non-biodegradable Styrofoam containers
And when I'm done sucking down those grease-ball burgers
I'm gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag
And then I'm gonna toss the Styrofoam containers right out the side
And there ain't a Goddamn thing anybody can do about it
You know why?
'Cause we got the bombs, that's why!
Two words: Nuclear F**kin' Weapons
Okay!?
Russia, Germany, Romania
They can have all the Democracy they want
They can have a big Democracy cake walk
Right through the middle of Tienemen Square
And it won't make a lick of difference
Because we got the bombs
Okay!?
John Wayne's not dead
He's frozen!
And as soon as we find a cure for cancer We're gonna thaw out "The Duke"
And he's gonna be pretty pissed off
You know why?
Have you ever taken a cold shower?
Well, multiply that by 15 million times
That's how pissed off "The Duke"'s gonna be
I'm gonna get "The Duke"
And John Cassavetes
And Lee Marvin
And Sam Peckinpah
And a case of whiskey
And drive down to Texas…..
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I hope you're keeping notes for a full-on TR with photos and diagrams and the whole bit for us poor slobs doing the niseko shuffle.
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they're not usually large enough to eat you, just take enough out of your leg to ensure you die of blood loss and shock... I think they do that deliberately - nasty, mean little bastards.
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Originally Posted By: stemikOriginally Posted By: Mantas
One of the attacks this week was in a lake near a boat ramp!
In a Lake??
Yep, in a lake. brakish shallow murky water that is linked to the sea is prime bull shark territory. That's why canals, and river mouths and such are probably more dangerous than the surf.
From wiki- The bull shark, Carcharhinus leucas, also known as the bull whaler, Zambezi shark or unofficially known as Zambi in Africa and Nicaragua shark in Nicaragua, is a shark common worldwide in warm, shallow waters along coasts and in rivers. The bull shark is well known for its unpredictable, often aggressive behavior. Many scientists agree that since bull sharks often dwell in shallow waters, they may be more dangerous to humans than any other species of sharks,[1] and that they join tiger sharks and great white sharks as the three shark species most likely to attack humans.[2]
Unlike most other marine sharks, bull sharks tolerate fresh water. They can travel far up rivers. As a result, they are probably responsible for the majority of shark attacks on humans that take place near the shore, including many attacks attributed to other species.[3] However, bull sharks are not true freshwater sharks (unlike the river sharks of the genus Glyphis). -
doesn't exactly look over run, does it?
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Has global warming been blamed for this yet? Surely it is only a matter of time.
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I wonder if she thought..... I gonna need a bigger board! Great trophy to show the grandkids though.
The media loves a good shark story and that fin does look more dolphin than shark. A shark swimming that close to the surface would show its tail fin as well, wouldn't it?
But yeah, pretty much anything more than knee deep and you're a half a chance. Bull sharks and bronze whalers can be dangerous even when fairly small (less than 2m) and people have died from their attacks simply due to massive blood loss. I've seen or heard or read somewhere that humans don't make good feeding for sharks anyway, we're too much bone and not enough meat. Many shark attacks tend to be bite and release, with few people ever actually being eaten. Small comfort, I know!
Speaking as a person with bugger all knowledge on the subject, I'd feel more comfortable swimming at ocean beaches, particularly on the east coast than at estuarine rivers, lakes, or canals, where those nasty little bull sharks lurk in shallow murky water.
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It is good, second only to doing a wee after desperately having to hold on for so long that it feels like your back teeth are floating. The relief, when it comes, is devine.
Need advice on how to fall down
in Snow talk, trip reports, Japan avalanche & backcountry
Posted
I reckon if you're falling hard too frequently you're not riding the board correctly. It may be that you're not using your centre of gravity to steer and therefore your down hill edge is not getting far enough clear of the snow. Watch learner snowboarders and their boards skim along the snow almost flat. They try to ride the edge but because they aren't getting their weight into the turn their down hill edge barely clears the snow - as a result they're constantly catching it and being whipped down hill. These are the falls that really do the damage. Having the board slide out from beneath you can hurt - I've broken some ribs landing toe side facing up the mountain, but the forces aren't anywhere near as bad as catching the dreaded downhill edge. So, the trick is to get the speed up to a good but safe level and commit to the turn, get your weight out over the edge of the board and get your down hill edge up high and clear of the snow. If it helps you can start by keeping your weight low and ride in a low crouch, the weight shift movement then simply becomes a slight sitting down movement for a heel side turn and a slight standing up movement for a toe side turn. Either way, a proper centre of gravity commitment to the turn is the key.
When you're in the deeper pow and the nose digs in another trick that works for me is to summersault forward – best done when you’re going a warp speed after coming off the groomers and into the pow. Rather than diving head first into the ground and having the board drag your feet over your head like a scorpion (which bloody hurts), roll with the fall, tuck your head under and do a summersault. It generally hurts less.
You could also ditch the safety gear except for the helmet and ride more carefully, but where is the fun in that!