Again this is a pretty clear example of what not to do. I was sitting on the rear left seat of the helo, and in this case I was shooting across the cabin and out the right hand side window. The internal reflections stuffed up the shot rather badly, but had I not included it, I would have effectively no shots of the Middle Head area.

The what? OK, Sydney Harbour of course has an entrance to the Pacific Ocean. As you would expect in any harbour that faces east, there is a north head, and a south head, through which you enter the harbour. HOWEVER once you're in, you run smack bang into a couple of peninsulas projecting into the centre of the harbour from the north side, dividing the harbour into several distinct zones.

The largest of these is Middle Head, which is not clearly visible here. You see the bridge across the harbour projection in the middle of the frame? That's The Spit. It is an opening bridge which is open at certain times of the day to allow boats to pass through, although boats which have a height of less than 6m can pass even without it being open. We'll see this more clearly in image 1003. The left hand side of that is Middle Head, or at least part of the land that eventually connects to Middle Head. The area beyond the Spit Bridge is Middle Harbour.

The land under us is the second of the peninsulas projecting from the north, called Dobroyd Head which sits within the suburb of Balgowlah Heights. The beach at the start of the coastline in the frame is Reef Beach, and the larger, more populated one is Forty Baskets Beach. The first name is as mundane as the second one is bizarre. There is a commonly believed myth that the name came from it being the place where 40 baskets of fish were caught for some soldiers that were in quarantine after returning from the Boer War. Even the Dictionary of Sydney, a historical project which is now hosted by the State Library, makes that claim. There's a small problem with that theory. A couple of local historians found an ad in a Sydney newspaper for a sailing regatta which was to be held in Manly. The ad stated that one of the flag-boats around which the boats would sail was located off "Forty Basket" Beach. (Note the singular name.) The date of the newspaper? May 23, 1859, quite a ways before the Boer War. Despite much speculation, the reality is that nobody can be certain where the name came from; not without a time machine, anyway.

I don't know whether the cove to the right has a separate name, although the greater body of water that we are looking at is North Harbour. The jetty that we can see just before the cove is Davis Marina, which is in the suburb of Balgowlah to the north of Balgowlah Heights.