Stockyard Point Lookout – Byfield National Park

Monthly Archives: April 2007

SES Cadets : 26/04/2007

This post is the third of a continuing series on my blog that will describe what I do every Thursday night at SES Cadets.

Tonight I was a little bit late, but only two other children were there already. Anyway, we waited a while, and then some of the St Brendan boys turned up. We waited a bit more for the St Ursula girls to come, but they were taking a long time, so we started doing knots instead. After we had been doing knots for 30 minutes or so, we gave up waiting for anyone else to come and decided to go the beach.

Arriving at the main beach near the Lifesaver building, we all walked down the stairs. First of all we did some pacing (finding out how long your strides are), and then we had a 100m race. Some of the boys are so fast that even though they were put on a 4 second delayed start, they still finished first. I crossed the finish line in either the 3rd or 4th place. After the race, we started playing with the balls by using the ramp just below the Lifesaver building. We kicked the ball up to the waiting person at the top and that person either rolled or kicked it back down again.

We all stayed at the beach for about 2 hours, then we drove back the SES HQ. To fill in time until everyone was picked up, Bob (one of the leaders) told us about the SES Cadet camp that is going to be on in June. He doesn’t know for sure where the camp is going to be, but he’s trying very hard to have it on North Keppel Island. I certainly hope it will be. Once he’d finished telling us that, our parents (and in the St Brendan boys case, the school bus) started to pick us up. And that was the end of SES Cadets.

Macadamia Picking

For the last 3 - 4 days my family has been going to a macadamia farm to help with the harvest. I found that that macadamia picking can be a very profitable exercise! There are two bucket sizes that can be picked, a 15L bucket and a 20L bucket. For every 15L bucket that is picked, you earn $5.00. For every 20L bucket that is picked, you earn $7.50. My personal record for the most buckets picked in a day was set on Wednesday the 4th April, 2007. I picked eight 20L buckets and two 15L buckets, which earned me $70.00.

To give you an idea of what the macadamia farm looked like, I have attached some pictures below the fold. Keep reading to see them. Read More »