Our next b.y.o picnic at the Kinaba Information Centre for breakfast from 8am on Sunday 16th February 2014
Swim, paddle, row, sail, motor or hitch a ride with a local and come and join us and visit the Gateway to the Everglades. So close and so delightful. As the Centre is in the National Park, no domestic animals.
We have now had 4 working bees as part of the restoration of the Kinaba Information Centre. A team of 4 to 6 people head up to Kinaba early on Geronimo, most often sailing both ways. Each bee is 4 to 6 hours of work, and a delicious spot for morning tea.
Here are some of the volunteers ready and willing to start work at Kinaba to reinvigorate and re-open the Kinaba Information Centre as a viable information and visitor centre.
Friends of Kinaba visit Kinaba regularly and invite everyone to meet there with us for a picnic lunch, breakfast, or morning or afternoon tea. It's a gorgeous place, and you can always find a cool, or dry, or shady, or sunny or out-of-the-wind spot to relax in.
We're fortunate to have great generosity bestowed on our group by Jim Bennett from Boreen Point who has kindly donated a 3.4 metre tinnie with trailer to be used by the Friends Of Kinaba's mariners in order to transport equipment and voulnteers to and from Kinaba.
Any day is wonderful in the Everglades, and last Wednesday was no exception. After motoring up and moving slowly through the channel past a dozen black swans inside Kinaba Island, we moved up past Kin Kin Creek and into Fig Tree Lake. There were Grebes, Little Black Cormorants, Darters, Pied Cormorants, Black Swans and Pelicans sunning themselves and feeding quietly.
After kayaking through the everglades on yesterday's gorgeous sunny early morning, we were paddling back across the eastern mouth, and there were about a dozen black swans sitting on the water. As we got closer, they became alert, and took flight. These were the only three I caught on film.
Heading home after doing the water monitoring at the designated spots around Kinaba, Ken, Pete, Martin and I were just crossing the shallow water between the sand spit parallel to the channel and Kinaba Point, and this is what we saw.
At the beginning of June, members of the Friends of Kinaba Steering Committee were inducted as National Parks’ volunteers, a first step in the long process of being given access to the Information Centre to commence the restoration and re-vitalization project.
Once we have permission to access the site, we will be forming working parties from our volunteers with the particular skills necessary for the job on hand. If you would like to be a volunteer for this project, please contact Charlie 5485 3950 or email info@kinaba.org.
A great article in the Noosa News on 9th September 2012
by Peter Gardiner explaining why we were having a picnic at Kinaba, and our intentions if we can get permission to start work.
