Coral Bay

It was lovely and quiet when we woke up this morning, the wind had died down and the sand wasn't sand blasting me as I wandered out onto the beach with Jospeh's fishing rod.  it wasn't long after the sun rose,however, that the wind picked up again and the waves began splashing in towards the shore.

Ithe clearing around our van there were one set of dog, dingo, or fox tracks; not sure which animal it was, and I followed them south down the beach.  this animal had been busy in the night and I found 16 dead crabs, yellow and about the size of my hand if you include their legs.  there were heaps of crab holes and crab scurry prints and olive green sponges all along the shore.  Not many shells.

I tried fishing for a bit.  My casting is not that great and with the wind blowing against me I didn't manage to get the line in very far, but I saw hundreds of fish swimming through the waves, which was very frustrating.  I was using a lure, and once it got caught fast in the rocks just offshore (they were hidden underwater, I'm not that silly to cast right onto big rocks) and I had to wade out and unhook it.

Grant unhooking Dom's line from a rock

I can see why people become mad keen fishermen.  it's not particularly pleasant sometimes, but the excitement of maybe catching a fish, maybe next time, maybe this next cast, is probably as addictive as people with the lottery.

Jopseh came down the beach looking for his rod and I had to hand it back.  Apparently Grant had fished a bit further north of me and caught some weird fish that he'd thrown back because he didn't know the recommended limit.  I showed Joseph all the fish in the waves and he couldn't help but throw the line in a few times.  In the end we decided a lure wasn't the thing to use and he swapped his line for a hook with squid on it.

Joseph managed to catch three fish, one of which, a bream, was a keeper, however Dominic is still trying.  One of the fish Joseph threw back was a medium sized blue lined snapper (or emperor fish) which had completely swallowed the hook.  A little later I was walking back to the van and found it floating upside down in the shallows - it didn't make it, so we ate that too.  We much preferred the taste of the snapper to the bream.  Cleaning fIsh is a messy job and I began to appreciate even more the gifts of fish we had had at the Yardie Creek caravan park.

Dominic played with the bream's head for a bit, checking out it's teeth and mouth and popping the eyeball out.  Then Oskar got involved and popped the lens out of the eyeball.  It was an amazing round, clear ball.  Fascinating, but smelly!  

After school work, inside mostly because of the wind, we phoned home from the top of the sand dune behind the van.  Here we are, alone in the middle of nowhere, and yet we have phone and Internet access.  It's never happened to us before!

Mid afternoon I went out with the rod again to see if I could catch anything again (not sure why, these fish are a messy business) however it was low tide and I didn't get anything.  I made sure I cast away from the rocks.

Dominic came out to explore with me, and in all the beached seaweed and sponges he found a turtle.  It's shell was about the size of a large cushion and it had become stranded in amongst the 40cm deep seaweed when the tide went out.  It was half buried in the seaweed and there kept quite moist, so when we lifted it out it's flippers started going and it struggled over the top of the seaweed towards the clear water.  I straightened it up, and as soon as it hit the clear water it's flipper went super fast, both at once, like an Olympic butterfly swimmer, and it's front came out of the water like a speedboat, and it powered away leaving a big wake behind.  It was the funniest thing!

We drove into Coral bay to check the post and see where we could have stayed if we weren't staying in the middle of nowhere.  It appeared to be a big caravan park with an incredibly expensive supermarket and lots of snorkel and dive shops.  it was very windy so we collected our mail from the post office, drove down to the beach front for a look, then came home.  I'm very glad we stayed in Cape Range for the two weeks.  It just suited us.

There are more emus around this part of Australia (Exmouth, Coral Bay) than I've ever seen before.  We heard of one man who took his dog for a walk on the beach in the morning and looked up to find an emu bearing down on him.  It had searched him out.  They run in a really funny way as well.  Strange bird.

Grant went out fishing once we got back, and there were lots of those crabs all over the beach.  So the fox/dog didn't get them all.  The wind has picked up again.  I don't really like wind much.  Grant has parked the car behind the van again to help shelter the van.  We made our dinner, read some of twenty thousand leagues under the sea, and went to bed.

Three little  hobbits at Nine Mile - Joseph, Dom and Oskar