As we drove up to our retirement home on the shores of Lake Cathie, 10 kilometres south of Port Macquarie, the Redhead and I looked at each other. I was the first to react: ''Who stole the bloody lake?''

Sand flats stuck out like isolated islands opposite our place. Only weeks before, the lake closed for two years to the ocean 400 metres away by storm-tossed sand had reached record heights.

So high in fact that the tannin-stained waters, bolstered by record recent rains, had began to encroach on expensive homes on acres in a prestige lakeside estate allowed to be built on a swamp. Port Macquarie-Hastings Council was suddenly forced to take remedial action. This council is now under State Government investigation for giving

irate ratepayers the finger by pushing ahead with an unpopular Glasshouse arthouse whose costs escalated from $7 million to over $60 million.

A council excavator cut a trench from the lake to the beach and the waves did the rest. The lake is once again subject to tidal influences.

It took a week, but the lake dropped more than a metre at low tide, exposing seagrass and weed to the sun and setting off a real stink. Boaties groaned as it became impossible to launch anything bigger than a bathtub into the pristine aquatic nursery grounds of bream, flathead, mullet, whiting and blackfish.

But businesses welcomed the decision which essentially got the council out of potential legal trouble and may or may not keep the lake open for summer.

''Wouldn't it be wonderful if it stayed open,'' a realtor gushed.

No one's putting money on it. In 2005, the lake was tidal for just eight months before pounding waves effectively jammed a sandy cork in the bottle.

A week after the opening, when Alita and I visited our daughter Jane, the lake was thronged with visitors, fishing and swimming in the clean waters.

The fish were hungry and it was elbow-only room on the rocky blackfish hot-spots. Migrating sea species such as salmon and tailor had nosed into the new estuary via the council trench to check out the easy pickings over the tidal flats and in the deep channels where blue water was gradually replacing black. And that's not all.

Ominously, diagonally opposite the Perch Hole, the carcasses of two bull sharks, about 1.5 metres long, had been dumped in the bush.