W decide to go up a bloody big mountain. Mount Warning. Wollumbin the Arakwal call it. Another sacred site. Its peak is the first piece of land in the whole world to catch the sun's rays every morning. You can see it from my beach, Clarkes beach, near my house. Sticking up like a giant curling wave from the ocean. Up we get, me and Tammo, at 4 in the morning so we can drive to the base of the mountain and get to the top in time to see the sun rise. Takes some motivation but we manage it. Its sides are cloaked in dense rainforest, its pretty dark in there even though light is creeping up on us. We spot a funny little marsupial called a pottteroo. At first I think its a koala bit its got a long snout and jumps around like a kangaroo. Doesn't seem to mind us. Potteroo, I wonder why its called that. Because is potters about? Because, like many of the population round here since 1967, it bobs around slowly, like its in a daze, like maybe its smoked a fair old bit of pot? Up we go, climbing up the mountain. Dripping with sweat even though its 6 in the morning. We get to the half way mark. 2.2km. 2.2 left to go. After a bit we sit down for a drink and take some photos of each other. I delete the ones of me. I look a wreck. A man in his 40s and 2 girls are coming down the path towards us. Did you see a man in a wetsuit who was up ahead of you?" They ask us in unison. The man is on a mobile phone. How did he get a signal up here? The girls tell us a man in a wetsuit is on the rampage just ahead of us on the path. He threatened them with violence. There's no on else up there. We'd better not continue. He's tripping. He's dangerous. He's waring a wetsuit to climb a mountain. Oh, we are downcast. Perhaps we should wait to see if anyone else comes and carry on walking up with them. Saftey in numbers. No one comes. Eventually, we decide that a it would be foolhardy not to heed a warning on Mount Warning. The others seemed to think he shouldn't be messed with. Ok. We stand up and, heads bent down in resignation, start the descent back to base. We pass 4 other lots of walkers on the way down. We tell them what the others told us. They know. They saw them too. They carry on walking up. We are certain it would be wrong to go back up. Its just a feeling. We reach the car park and the man in his 40s rushes over. Are you OK? Did you decide to come back down? Yeah, we reply. He's called the police. We know we did the right thing. Blimey. All that effort for nothing. The sun is up. We jump in Dolly the Datsun and I drive home. Pinning my eyes open with all the effort I can muster. There's always another dawn. Says Tamsin. Yep. We go back to bed and sleep till 2. Get up. Go surfing. Now its today. I wake up to the sound of rain on the tin roof of the verandah. pelting down. Hard little beans. Get up and walk to the beach in bare feet. The smell of rain on the road and the briny ocean. The sand is dimpled from the drops of water. Mount warning is invisible under a cloudy cloak. I walk to the lighthouse, look out across the ocean. Dolphins, dozens of them, are somersaulting out of the waves, bearing white bellies as they backflip and hurtle along in the foamy surf. I gasp outloud and look across to my right where a girl with headphones has stopped to catch her breath mid-jog. She doesn't see them. Its only me. I'm the only one watching the acrobats in the sea. Just for me. Then I see three dark shapes cruising along beneath the water. Black shadows. More dolphins. I look across at the other dolphins, splashing about. Tiny in comparison. The shadows glide broodingly. A fin breaks the surface of the water. Sharks. Massive ones. s***. Then a turtle ambling at the surface over a rocky reef. Floating briefly before diving under. I climb back down to the beach and perch on a rock, watching surfers groove along on the nicest waves we've seen for weeks, big and curling for hundreds of metres. What if they knew about the sharks, I wonder. its a long slow leisurely ride to the shore at Watego's. I realise that, like me, they take the risk just for that feeling of being propelled by the energy of the wave, to feel part of the ocean, one of the dolphins. The sharks don't want them, they hope. I start collecting shells to make a picture or something in the sand and a little girl called Lila comes along to help. She is six. We make a heart shape. Its nearly Valentines Day, she says. Oh yeah. So it is.