There were many times when I was solo parenting my four boisterous bairns and there is no way I could have driven them anywhere at night. Two or three glasses of wine when cooking and/or after they had gone to bed… no driving for me.
Luckily I never did have a medical emergency that required me to drive them to Casualty… not at night anyway. Our house was right on the bush, in the ‘flame zone’, but luckily we never had a bushfire too close.
Whew!
Sometimes someone would ask for a lift to the bus stop or the shops and I’d have to say: ‘No can do, son or daughter of mine.’ That was OK.
But last night, I would have HATED not to be able to hop in the car with my son. A call came through from a friend, Kate, who has lived for almost 20 years at Jervis Bay. She told us there there was bioluminescence in the water and we should hop down there to check it out. Kate was at Shark Net Beach in Huskisson, our holiday rental was at Plantation Point in Vincentia so we drove along to check out Barfleur Beach first, thinking we’d drive over to Huski if we couldn’t see any.
But we did! With bare feet and lights off, we walked down to the water and started splashing with our feet… and there were heaps of sparkles lighting up wherever we disturbed the water. Tiny sea fairies playing around our feet!
We could make fairy footprints in the damp sand of the beach, we saw the tops of tiny wavelets sparkle brightly as they tipped over and rolled into the sand. What a pleasure and what a joy.
When I was a little girl in Scotland we spend all our summers around the Hebridean islands and we often saw this natural phenomenon; we called it ‘fluoresence.’ As we rowed back to our boat, the oars would light up in the water, we would splash and play on the beach and run around on the sand making glistening footprint as I did with my son.
So I had a good dose of childhood reminiscence as we played with the bioluminescence. Hooray!
How glad am I that my beers prior that evening were a zero alcohol ones?
NB Check out beautiful pro images of Jervis Bay bioluminescence here.
