This warm weather is getting under my skin – and personally, I blame the surfing ducks.
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In summer I like having a fairly basic swimming pool in the back yard.
A place where you can take a quick dip to lower your body temperature instantly, or sit around on a warm evening, watching the stars and sipping a cool drink.
But, as all pool owners know, that joy comes at the end of a lot of planning, cleaning, balancing chemical levels, skimming, filtering and monitoring.
It must be close to monitoring a nuclear power plant: take your eye off it for one moment and BA-DOING, the Creature from the Black Lagoon is crawling out of the festering pit.
Monitoring at Casa Bushwhacked has been put on hold for quite a long time this year.
Over the off-season the pool was colonised by a pair of rather handsome ducks who were smart enough to think it’s be better to spend the hunting season in inner urban Bendigo than the wilds of the Kerang lakes.
In the morning you’d find them splashing about, or paddling serenely to and fro – or standing on the edge of the pool.
They were very picturesque.
On a cold morning, you could see them swimming around in swirls of dawn mist and just the sight of them made you feel better about the world.
They even had the cats’ measure.
Our resident moggies, Boof and Pat-the-Cat, stalked them for a while, but they did not seem to understand that the ducks had good eyesight and even better common sense.
As a cat would edge stealthily towards the swimming pool, the ducks would simply give a quick paddle or two and float to the other side.
In the end, the cats gave up, preferring to keep an eye on them from the comfort and safety of their lounge chairs.
The ducks then took to surfing.
I’d left an inflatable sun lounge in the pool and the ducks took to it like, well, like a duck to water.
They’d leap aboard, all feathers and flutters and then stand proudly as the breezes nudged it around the pool.
There is actual photographic evidence of this.
The ducks dropped in throughout winter and less frequently into spring, but just as I thought it was time to embark on the soul-destroying task of bringing the pool back to life for summer, they’d make a surprise visit.
As a result, the pool tasks were again put on ice.
For most of the year, therefore, the pool had gone unchlorinated, while nature continued to add to the biomass with mobs of leaves, duck poop and other unidentified stuff.
They seem to have genuinely vacated the premises now and for the past week there has been an exhausting effort to get things ready for summer, including replacing the pool filter pump, which appears to have died because it didn’t get a workout in the cold months.
It is a reasonable guess that the Creature from the Black Lagoon and its extended family will eventually be discovered in the primal ooze on the bottom of the pool.
And even then, the work might not get finished in time for a scorching Christmas/New Year, but you know what?
Watching our surfing ducks was well worth it.
WAYNE GREGSON