Hi All,

Welcome to our annual letter for 2025!

As usual, if you want to find out what we are doing more than once a year, you can visit our Facebook pages by clicking Karen's Facebook page and Brett's Facebook page. You can also see a whole lot more of our photos on Brett's Flickr page - which now has almost 86,000 images on display.

Click / touch the thumbnails below for larger images then click / touch them again to make them small again.

Walking in Victoria

At the end of last year's letter I mentioned only one planned activity for this year - a trip to the Victorian high country. That went ahead in late February. We did a lot of walking at Dinner Plain, Dargo, Bairnsdale, Mansfield and Colac Colac.

Centenary Trail around Canberra

In April Karen led a ride around the Canberra Centenary Trail for the Shoalhaven Bicycle User Group (BUG). Brett chose to stay home as he had done the ride before, and he is not actually a member of the Shoalhaven BUG.

Scotia Sanctuary

From late July to mid August Brett and Karen did volunteer work on the Australian Wildlife Conservancy's Scotia Sanctuary in western NSW. To get to Scotia, you turn left halfway along the highway between Mildura and Broken Hill and head about 70 kilometres west towards the South Australian border. The country is pretty flat and featureless, but part of the sanctuary is great habitat for endangered animals behind its 38 kilometres of electric fence.

We did a variety of different jobs - basically doing whatever needed to be done - see the photos below which show our quarters, a Bridled Nailtail Wallaby; feral pigs being put to good use; Karen doing fence maintenance; Kas holding a Bilby; Bilby trapping; emus; property maintenance; filling water tanks to top up tanks out in the sanctuary as there are no watercourses on the property and the old dams have been decommissioned; electric fence checking; and a Wedge-tailed Eagle accidentally caught in a cat trap which was soon released unharmed ...

Shoalhaven Bushwalkers (SBW)

As they had done during the previous two years, the SBW committee continued to ignore the club's constitution and make terrible decisions. When Brett emailed the committee with a number of suggestions to improve the club, they cancelled his membership - and their reasons show the lack of quality of their decision-making.

Their first argument was that Brett's suggestions were deliberately vexatious and deliberately designed to prevent the committee from running the club effectively. This was obviously untrue, as the committee was not running the club effectively in the first place - otherwise there would have been no need for the suggestions. In addition, all the suggestions were reasonable, and the committee has already acted on some of them!

Their second argument was that Brett's suggestions were totally valid, but that he should have realized that the committee would have a lot of work to do if they were to act on the suggestions. A committee of a dozen or so people should be able to process one person's suggestions easily. Brett was effectively kicked out of the club for wrongly assuming that the committee was competent.

Karen is still a member of the club.

Rogaining

In April, Brett and Karen teamed with friend Joe to win their mixed superveteran age category (55 to 65) in the Paddy Pallin 6hr rogaine south of Canberra. They also came 2nd in the 44 to 55 age category and 11th out of 70 in the mixed open. Brett was giving away 50 years to some of those competitors! Karen's dodgy knees got through the rogaine okay - thanks to painkillers!

Brett's continual struggle to find compatible rogaining partners led him to think that his days of competing in the longer events (12 and 24 hours) might be over, but a few weeks prior to the NSW championships he checked the "partner finder" section of the event website and found a partner. Tony and Brett are now NSW champions in their age category, having won the 2025 NSW championships at Mt Werong - just south of Oberon in mid September.

They then won the Men's Ultravets and Supervets (65+ and 55+) at a 6 hour event at Engadine in early November, and had another victory in their age category at a 12 hour event in the Bondo State Forest between Canberra and Tumut a couple of weeks later. They are planning on teaming up for more 24 hour events in 2026 - including the Australian Championships in Queensland, in preparation for the World Championships in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia in 2027!

Queensland Trip

From 12th September to 15th October Karen organised one of the most diverse trips away that we have ever done. It started with three nights at Oberon for Brett's NSW Rogaining Championships with Tony, then walking for a couple of days at Fingal Bay, and three days at Yamba.

We then travelled to Maroochydore for five nights, staying with friends Leanne and Mark, with Karen competing for her Jervis Bay Wobbegongs team in the Australian Winter Swimming Championships at Mooloolaba on one of the days (the Wobbegongs came an excellent 6th out of 22 teams)! On the other four days we alternated walking and cycling in preparation for six days of cycling (320km) with friends Vic and Jan on the potentially deadly Kilkivan to Kingaroy Rail Trail and Brisbane Valley Rail Trails where we were attacked by Magpies on 27 separate occasions!

Still with Vic and Jan we travelled to the Sunshine Coast hinterland for a few days of walking and mountain climbing in the Glasshouse Mountains, before splitting from our friends and heading for more mountains in Springbrook NP for another three days of excellent walking.

Then it was on to Murwillumbah for an out-and-back day ride on the northern section of the Northern Rivers Rail Trail, then to Casino for another out-and-back day cycle on the southern section of the Northern Rivers Rail Trail.

We finished the five weeks with three nights at Southwest Rocks, and even more walking!

Blue Mountains Walking

Our last trip away for the year was a week of walking in the Blue Mountains in early December - 4 days at Leura and 3 days at Blackheath. Despite many trips to the mountains over the years, Karen still managed to find amazing walks that we had not done before, and new scenery. A couple of return visits to places we had been before made us realize anew just how spectacular the Blue Mountains are!

Bay and Basin Camera Club (BBCC)

Brett has been a member of the BBCC since it began in 2008. For many years he did not compete for its Photographer of the Year competition because it was print based, and Brett thought that digital photography was the way to go. With the exception of deciding the Photo of the Year, all of the club's competitions are now completely digital - and Brett is working on alternative solutions for making the Photo of the Year digital as well ...

Anyway, in the last few years Brett has tried harder to compete for Photographer of the Year, but extended overseas and local trips made image creation and submission difficult (but not impossible). Improvements in technology have made communications much easier, and this year Brett made a real effort with his photography, finally managing to win Photographer of the Year. It helped a lot that he had taken lots of photos in Scotland and Iceland the previous year as well!

As a demonstration of just how much mobile phone photography has improved, all of Brett's photos for 2025 were taken on his Google Pixel 7 Pro phone! Here are his 7 favourite photos for the year ...

Other Stuff

Karen still swims three or four times a week, and during Winter she still competes in Sunday races with the Wobbegongs Winter Swimming Club at Huskisson. Karen is still riding her mountain bike with the Shoalhaven Bicycle Users Group (BUG) on Thursday mornings, but is increasingly contemplating moving to an electric bike soon as she is often the slowest rider. Karen is still on the BirdLife Shoalhaven committee as Treasurer as well.

Brett is still the BirdLife Shoalhaven e-magazine editor, and he is still on the committee of the BBCC, managing their website and Facebook page. He is also still golfing once a week, with his handicap hovering around 9 or 10 - although he would like it to be 18!

We still feed our resident Magpie pair - Ricky and Lucy - who have been with us for over eleven years now, but only come in to say hullo on rare occasions.

Health

With great age comes ever-increasing health issues. For Brett - colonscopies, ectopic heart beats and a possible ablation (laser heart surgery) in the next year or two, blood thinners, blood pressure medication, laser surgery to ward off increasing ocular pressure in the right eye, regular skin cancer excisions with a major one on his right leg in November keeping him off his feet for a few weeks, and more surgery scheduled soon - such is life.

Karen remains reasonably fit and well, but her knees are not getting any younger and mentions of a possible electric bike are more and more frequent these days. She has had a couple of back issues, and recurring foot pain due to a plantar wart - so her infirmity list is starting to get longer as well.

Plans for 2026

Assuming Brett and Karen both remain above ground, they don't have a lot planned for 2026 - although Brett has marked a lot of rogaines in his calendar. Karen has a couple of small trips planned - to Canberra and the Snowy Mountains, but she will almost certainly come up with more trip ideas to fill obvious voids in her calendar.

As always, Karen and I hope you had a great 2025, and we hope you will have an even better 2026!

Cheers,

Brett and Karen

P.S. Our previous annual letters can be viewed by clicking the following links - 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024.