Yeppoon Australia Day 2010 Fireworks Display

There was a great turnout tonight for the 2010 Australia Day fireworks show on Yeppoon main beach. Every year, Ergon Energy sponsors the fireworks, which generally start at around 7:45pm and last for 10-15 minutes.

On past Australia Days the fireworks have been launched from a boat anchored just off the main beach, but this year all the action took place at the northern end of Main Beach (near the Surf Lifesaver building). Event organisers and SES personnel made sure the crowd stayed well back from the launch trailer.

Below are some additional pictures of the fireworks display. I took almost a hundred photos, but the lack of a tripod meant that only 20-30% turned out ok.

As of the latest BOM Tracking Map, ex-Tropical Cyclone Hamish has been downgraded to a Tropical Low. Currently the low is moving up the coast again (almost doubling back on its tracks) in a north west direction. Dangerous weather is expected for the Capricorn Coast (RRC Media Release).

Tropical Cyclone Hamish from bom.gov.au.
View a timelapse animation of Cyclone Hamish.

The BOM has stopped issuing track maps.

Rising Creeks by Jylan Wynne

From 9am on Tuesday morning to 9am on Wednesday morning, Yeppoon and surrounding districts had over 80.6mm, or 3.1 inches of rain. This is enough to flush out all the creeks and leave a lot of water lying around on the ground, but so far there has been no major flooding like in February 2008.

The Capricornia district forecast from the Bureau of Meteorology has this to say about Wednesday and the days ahead:

CAPRICORNIA DISTRICT

Outlook for Wednseday: Rain areas. Isolated thunderstorms. Moderate to heavy falls possible. Moderate
NW to NE winds, shifting W to SW inland during the day.

Outlook for Thursday: Scattered coastal showers, more isolated inland.

Outlook for Friday: Scattered coastal showers, isolated inland. Late rain.

YeppoonInfo.com will keep you updated on any weather developments in the area.

This new site includes a totally different structure, for example along the top just above the random header image display (which showcases panoramas around the Yeppoon region), there is a places menu listing all the localities in this area. Above that menu are the resource links, which currently include the Yeppoon Events, Yeppoon Photo Panoramas and Yeppoon Accommodation pages. Later on as soon as I can code it, I hope to add a Yeppoon News page which people can subscribe to via email or RSS.

If you have any other suggestions of what to add or what I can change, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Last night we went to one of the performances in the Yeppoon Town Hall. Entry to the performance was totally free, unlike last year when it was $2. First off, they had a band of string musicians from 7:30PM to 8PM, when the main show started. The main show had lots of dancing, with a live band providing music for some of the acts. The show finished at 9:30PM, so in all there was 2 hours of performing.

There was a mixture of music and performances, ranging from traditional Singaporean music to 1970′s stuff.

One of my favourite acts was this man who was able to copy instruments like the drums and didgeridoo using only his voice. This sport is called beatboxing. In the video I’ve included below, you’ll be amazed at what he can do. There was no accompanying music however.

If you missed the performance at the Yeppoon Town Hall, fear not, there are quite a few more performances coming up this month around Rockhampton. See http://www.venuesandevents.com.au/whatsonNOV.html#MDC.

I managed to take lots of video of the event (1.2GB in all), so I’ve embedded some Youtube videos and photos below. The photos aren’t too good because of the low light. Remember that you can watch the high quality version of the videos by going to the YeppoonInfo Youtube account and selecting the video, then clicking the “high quality” link just underneath it. There are also some videos on that account that I haven’t embedded on this post.

Photo #1 from one of the traditional dances

Photo #2 from one of the traditional dances

Photo #3 from one of the traditional dances

The beatboxing guy who can imitate the didgeridoo and drums with his voice. No extra music added!

A Singaporean traditional song (I think).

One of the very last performances by the Music & Drama company. Costumes were from a ’70s themed part.

The Last act of the night

At the moment the panoramas are only in JPEG format, and there a not many 360 degree views. However I plan to add 360 views in the Quicktime VR format, which allows people to pan and zoom around in a full circle.

Anyway, please have a look at the photo panoramas and tell me which ones you like best. For your information, I photographed most of them using my Canon A720 and the included photo stitching software.

To see a street view, just go to Google Maps Australia and click the street view tab in the top right corner. If there is street view available in that area the streets will appear outlined in blue. To look at the street using street view, just double click the blue outline.

Taken from the BOM, the lowest temperature it has been in Yeppoon (so far) since the start of winter is a pretty freezing 3.9, recorded on the 11th of July. The highest temperature recorded (also so far) is a balmy 24.5, recorded on the 4th of June.

So far this Winter Yeppoon has received 40.2mm of rain, which is mostly made up of small amounts falling every day. Enough to keep things green, but not really proper rain.

I can’t decide whether or not I like Winter as much as Summer. Summer is really nice and hot, I can go swimming every day in the dam, but its usually really windy. Winter is a lot cooler, too cool for swimming, but there is hardly any wind. We also get beautiful evening and morning mists, not to mention spectacular sunsets.

The blog post linked to above gave links to a few sites, but I found http://www.aussieheritage.com.au/listings/qld/Yeppoon/SugarWagonTrail/1749 to be the most helpful. The page on the Aussie Heritage site gave some kind of geographical co-ordinates for the start of the trail, so I found a converter and converted the co-ordinates given into the type that my GPS could understand. Unfortunately I didn’t get to use them, because we found the trail by accident, although it was only a small section. By the time we’d walked and explored it thoroughly everyone was too tired to try and find the beginning, so that will have to wait for another time.

Anyway, I better start telling you how we find it. First of all we drove along the beachside road heading in the Farnborough direction, because I wanted to see if we could get to the co-ordinates that I found. After a bit of looking in the roads and streets up there, we decided to head back and walk up Meikleville hill (where the trail starts), using the track that goes up to the Radio and TV towers. I won’t tell exactly how to get to the access track, but I’ll give you a clue: It is on the western side of the hill. If you’re serious in climbing it just email me.

The top of the second hill, looking out over the ocean.

About halfway up the hill, the access track split into two, with the bigger track heading up to the top of the Meikleville and the smaller track heading off to the left along the ridge of the hill. Since we’d never been along the smaller track, we decided to go that way. The track continued on, and eventually we came out on the top of the hill across from Meikleville. I guess the geography is something like a mountain range, except in small scale. We never had to go down to ground level, instead we just walked along the ridge.

On the top of the second hill the smaller track split into two even smaller tracks, one going down the hill on the western side and other (which was very steep and narrow) going down the hill on the eastern side. It was at that point we decided to go back.

Now, when my sisters were coming up the second hill after me, they had seen a really rough shelter with old tarps, mattresses and cut branches. We had all come down the hill and were investigating this when I saw another track heading off, with a row of stones on either side! At this point we weren’t sure whether or not whether this was the Kanaka trail, but as we ventured further on and saw that the rows of rocks on either side were continuing, we decided that no-one would go to this much effort just for a walking track. A bit further on, we came to this large collection of rocks that confirmed that this was the Kanaka trail.

A definite sign that the track we found was indeed the Kanaka trail. All those rocks would have been at least a metre high.

A tiny bit further round the corner than the photo above.

Now for the sad part: Just 30 metres or so after the above photos we came out onto a block of land that had been all cleared and dug away. When we walked over to the other side to try and find the trail again, there were no traces. Today (Sunday) my mum was talking to some friends who knew more about the Kanaka trail and they said that the Capricorn Coast Historical Society had actually taken the developer of this land to court over the issue, but the developer had won .

We came out onto a block of land that had been cleared. Try as we might, we couldn’t find any trace of the trail continuing around the hill. I think we’ll need a good guide for that!

After playing a while on the hill (think large rocks, kinetic energy and a steep slope), we walked back to the old tarps to try and go the other way. We found a little bit of the track, but after a while it petered out and split up. So we stopped looking, walked back down the hill, got in the car and went home. A short and sweet ending .

But this won’t be the end of the search. I’m going to get in contact with some people who know the track really well and we’ll probably do some more exploring in the near future. Stay tuned!

Yeppoon Central Sign

Yeppoon finally got what has been needed for years. Yesterday on March 3rd, a new shopping centre by the name of Yeppoon Central finally opened on the roundabout corner of Park Street, Tanby Road and Old Rockhampton Road. There are 3 major shops and restaurants, Big W, Woolworths, and McDonalds, as well as 30 other smaller shops.

A list of the smaller shops is below.

• SK Hotels Bottle Shop
• Yeppoon Central Meats
• Supercuts
• Sanity
• Mad House
• Nextra Yeppoon Central
• Amcal Max
• Mystique Jewellers
• Yeppoon Travel World
• Jay Jay’s
• Xodus
• Forever Young
• Rockmans
• Crave
• Sunny
• Payless Shoes
• Strandbags
• EB Games
• Leading Edge Telecom
• Suncorp
• Flight Centre
• Lenards
• Dick Smith Electronics
• Donut King
• Michel’s Patisserie
• The Coffee Club
• Origin Kebabs

The shopping centre was built on a 7.4 acre block of land. The total area of the shopping centre is 14,000 square metres while the area of Big W is 6,100 square metres and Woolworths is 4,200 square metres. There are a total of 800 parking spots, with 700 under the shopping centre and 100 outside. Both Dick Smith Electronics and McDonalds are located at the main entrance, which will be good. There are numerous entrances, including a travelator (which is like an escalator only with no steps) and a lift. The whole centre cost $60,000,000 to build and more than 500,000 man hours.

Below are some of the photos I took on the opening day.

McDonalds Yeppoon, a recent addition to the Yeppoon Central shopping centre. McDonalds opened about a week ago on the 12th October 2008.

The entrance to Woolworths.

Some of the isles in Woolworths. The colour scheme that they have used combine silver, for the walls (look right down at the far right end), and green and brown for signs.

This is looking from the balcony down to the road. The showground is just across the road. The vacant area will soon contain a McDonalds, which is going to be built soon.

Looking over the balcony. Just inside the doors are the food shops.

The entrance to Big W. If you have got an old Big W in your area chances are you haven’t seen (or even heard about) the new logo. Now you can.

Looking at Dick Smith Electronics. The entrance is just around the right corner. Dick Smith Electronics is situated right underneath the balcony.