September 18th, 2005 – Two Schlongs are better than one!

Sunday we left for Manly to meet up with Vincent – a family friend of Laure’s. For a place as well traveled as Manly, you’d think they would have an easy way of getting there by bus. We learned the hard way that it actually requires a combination of buses to get to the wharf. Rather than take a second bus we decided to trek the rest of the way around the coast. It was a sunny day but the wind was ripping through any layers we had and we only lasted an hour and a half before we headed over to Ocean World to meet up with Vincent. En route there was one of the ocean pools along the shore, where a concrete bed is filled by the tides. Ocean World is a small subsidiary of the Sydney aquarium at which Vincent has been volunteering his time – a little disgruntled that everyone else gets paid for the work he’s doing. He offered to take us in for free and we had a first class tour of the facilities. We saw everything from sea horses and sharks to spiders and reptiles. Although the building was modest from the outside we discovered that the underwater tunnels stretch under the harbor and the shark tank is one of the biggest in the Southern hemisphere. We also learned that after copulation the male sperm hardens and protects the female shark from getting knocked up by a different male. All this very graphically as they swam over our heads not to mention the two penises on the male shark to increase the odds and the serious battle wounds left behind from the mating process. We had decided to take advantage of the free barbeques in Manly, but with the wind howling and Vincent in a t-shirt, we decided we’d better grab some fish ‘n chips instead. Vincent was nice enough to share with us the fact that there are an abnormally large amount of sharks in the sea shell beach off of Manly where he recently went scuba-diving – very reassuring. It seems that splashing about triggers shark attacks more than blood in the water and dawn and dusk are feeding times so I figured I’ll just spend my time wading in the middle of the day!