Sorry I have been quiet, we are literally surrounded by out of control bushfires.
As most will know we are on the East coast, the winds have been horrific and coming from the West and the fires have only been stopped when they have hit the ocean.
Directly to the West of us, North of us and South of us is nothing but millions upon millions of wilderness bushland. We have been in drought now for 6 months and the amount of fuel in the bush, is incredible.
The smoke has been hard to deal with, lots of houses have been lost, the highway (the only road we have going North & South on the coast) has been overrun over 40 kilometres in length and has been closed for a week. We are now totally isolated to the South with no exit. A fire broke out to the North yesterday and we feared we would be totally cut off in both directions, they aeroplane and helos bombed the heck out of it and managed to get it out thankfully. We never hear planes, the amount of air traffic over our house is incredible and a relief to hear.
Two days ago a plane load of volunteer Canadian firefighters arrived in Sydney and were rushed South to us and today a plane load of American volunteer firefighters have arrived in Sydney to help the exhausted Aussie crews.
There was a town meeting yesterday 30 k's to our home that we were able to watch via live stream, they think that they fires will burn for weeks if not months yet. The toll on humans and wildlife is unbelievable.
It would be hard to portray in words the ferocity of these fires and the magnitude of the size of them and that they are in millions of acres of wilderness.
We are prepared as much as we possibly can be and are ready for ember attack, if worse comes to worse we have boats ready to put in the lake upside down and we will enter the water and come up underneath the boats until the fire passes. That's a worse case scenario, they are loading the Boeing 737 water bombers with a pink fire retardant and the 737 is coming in following a smaller spotter aircraft and they have been doing a lot of precision bombing and saved a lot of the houses in the villages just to our South and scores of farm houses. We also have the massive Sky Crane helo water bombers and around 30 helos with large canvas buckets.
Just the size of the front of the bushfire is so huge and there are so many fires burning that the resources are stretched to their limits. Even Sydney is blanketed in thick smoke.
Thankfully the crews from Cananda and the US will be a great relief to the Rural Fire Service.
We still thankfully have power. Not sure what xmas will be like if these fires are still burning. the two weeks before Christmas and all of January are our hottest months and School holidays and most Aussies have that as their annual holidays, not sure how many tourists we will get this year, its very eery presently, like a ghost town.
I think we should be ok with the air support here now, the smoke, the sun block out and falling leaves are unpleasant, but nothing like what some of the other areas are experiencing close to us.