NEW LOW IN SIZE OF HUNTED PIPI

22/06/2010

The size of a Pipi hunters midden at the rear of Beach 5s carpark beggers belief. How much longer can the population survive when this is the size that they are down to taking out?

These little guys ( 5 cent peice for scale) never got a chance to breed and set the next generation.

The Pipi hunters are also wearing a track through the dunes off of the proper access track, obviously not what people who are taking a legal catch size would do. Besides the Pipi carnage, this impacts the beach in multiple ways. From the blowout of the dunes to the disposable nappies littering the sides of the tracks, if Venus Bay is your beach then this is whats happening.

Being open

I'm putting a bit of work into ways that this VBOP project can use other common web social networking tools and sites to broaden itself. More particularly to make our information easy to submit and use. Well I guess it is not secret but the systems have to be OPEN not closed! Sound simple but it is hard to explain why in a short post, but that is not important.

There is already a presence in Flickr and Twitter. Expect to see some news on BUZZ,  A Picassa Web Album, a wiki style Field Guide and even a neat mobile phone data collection application using Fronteline.SMS

But don't expect to see any Facebook follow me or friends requests or even Like buttons here anytime soon.

Venus & the Crescent Moon

Venus is visible as a very bright start at and just after sunset in the west and yesterday it was very close to the crescent moon.

A great photo opputunity!

By the way Venus Bay is not named after the planet Venus. It was changed to Venus Bay by Francis Peron on one of Baudain's Charts, and is thought to have been named after George Bass's ship the copper sheathed brig Venus. In appreciations of Bass's kindness in providing the distressed French expedition with fresh food.

Why are Moon Phases Important?

I've included a phases in the moon applet over on the right because the position of the moon, more particularly the alignment of the sun, moon &earth, has a big influence of the magnitude of our tides. We see these tides as a roughly twice daily rise & fall of the sea level. The so called spring tides, are not just limited to spring (or autumn), they occur roughly twice a month (as the graphic above shows) at either the new moon or the full moon. Other times of the month see lesser tidal range because the gravitational pulls are not aligned. You can get the predicted tide times from the Bureau of Meterology Website (Venus Bay tides are roughly the same time as for the Port Phillip Heads)

Venus Bay does get higher tides in spring and autumn that have a significant extra height due to strong ocean swells and waves. Sometimes these highs can be forced higher by a storm surge or strong on-shore winds.

So the new moon this weekend make it a candidate to see more erosion, possibly higher than last month.

Please Be Patient

I have begun transferring post from the old free NING site (which will be closed done at the end of the month, Not Happy NING!) to here. Where possible I want to have the same information and photos available here. However getting the photos across is very manual at the moment so I will be doing a few posts at a time.

Unless someone knows a magic way to automate this transfer?