At the end of the Easter holidays we had some unseasonal rain that we got caught in while we were working and got absolutely soaked and we drove the golf cart back to the office and spent the next hour drying out all our cleaning and restocking stuff. It came down like cats and dogs for a solid five hours but it wasn't cold so we kept on working and walking around in the rain like a couple of old drowned rats. Even though we are on sand the water does sit around in some places and makes it a bit awkward for some.
There was little waterfalls washing the sand and dirt down the roads in the caravan park and causing crevices exposing water pipes under the ground.
The main roads get cut when this sort of rain happens and people get stuck in Coral Bay. There is only one road of 13km leading to Coral Bay from the main highway and then the highway from Carnarvon to Exmouth gets cut when the Lyndon River in the south floods and the dips in the road become impassable toward the north and the highway to the east doesn't cope too well either. So there were a few days that people were finding themselves stuck for a few days until the water went down, but in the mean time we had beautiful days for swimming, snorkelling and fishing. The manager, Matt and his group of merry men, another Steve and Rod, had their work cut out for them with the bobcat moving unwanted sand and filling in unwanted holes only to be rained on again the next weekend and not to the same extent but the same thing happened all over again and once more people were stuck in Coral Bay.
Rod told us that we have seen more rain in the couple of weeks we have been here than he has seen in the last eleven months, but it was all over and we haven't seen anymore rain since.
We have gotten used to our jobs and now we are all used to each other and we know what we are doing, life is becoming quite easy. Now that I know how strong the heavy duty bleach is and I don't ruin any more tablecloths. (It was only two and they were used as mats in the office when it was raining...not a total waste). The caravan park do their own laundry so we help with that as well when it is needed. I think we give the maintenance guys a few extra things to do as Steve and I let them know about little jobs to fix as we find them in the cabins and villas and we are finding we are getting on top of the full cleans now that there is full staff to do all the jobs. We have a couple of younger people, Matt and a French girl Korine help us on the busy days and our days off, Monday and Tuesday; and they also do the ablution block with Sango and Cris. These guys all live in staff housing for the workers in town called Pleasant Ville...its like a little urban village that the caravan park owns 5 and the staff that live in them pay rent. Unfortunately (or not) the 5 units are full so we stay in the caravan park and pay reduced site fees. We get to meet different people that come and go but we also have to put up with others. On one side of us we have a permanent,
Doug nicknamed Deckie that we get along with quite well and is a wealth of local knowledge, true or not I'm not sure, he drives the airport shuttle bus picking up the tourists from Exmouth because everyone comes to have a look at Coral Bay...for a couple of reasons and two sites up the other side of us we have Roger and he owns Ecotours out the front and does a very good business with boat tours. There three other couples that work here and two other permanents, three other dongers housing the resident nurse, fisheries and DEC (parks and wildlife) and about 100+ sites and 8 cabins, 8 villas and 0ne penthouse, and we have a few locals visit us of the wildlife kind
...and that is what we have living around us, other than the beetles and crickets coming out since the rain oh and the centipede that walked in under our awning and Steve fly swatted it to death before it caused us any havoc.
Now, we don't have all work and no play!
Some days one of us may only have half an hours work so sometimes we have plenty of free time to fill in. We have walked up to Mauds Point
which was a three hour return walk along the water front and it was high tide the day we did this so we had to walk in the water and over rocks. On the way we pass Skeleton Beach which is a shark sanctuary but we didn't see any sharks and we sat at Mauds Point watching the snorkelling and dive tour boats going out to sea for a while before we walked back.
We have snorkelled in the bay a few times sometimes we just go for a swim and cool down after work. Coral Bay is a sanctuary zone and there is no fishing or collecting of any kind and there is fish feeding in the arvos on Mon, Wed, and Fridays; so the fish are quite happy to swim around our legs in the shallow...it is amazing to see 2 ft spangled emporer swimming around your legs as you walk in knee deep water. Last week as we walked in Steve saw a 4ft shovel nosed shark/ray as we walked in ( I think a few people would have been out of the water quick if they had seen that coming) and then as you snorkel out further the fish are in huge numbers of all sorts, shapes and colours; beautiful parrot fish, wrasse, butterfly fish and lots of other yummy things that we would love to have on our dinner plates.
We met the two volunteers, Ken and Margaret, at the information booth and they told us about the lavender patch and Ayres Rock. We found Ayres Rock about 200 metres off shore (we only had a black and white buoy as a reference point and we had to go about 50 metres south west of that), we were aimlessly swimming around in the wide blue sea keeping our eye on the buoy and then we bumped into Ayres Rock, a huge brain coral with fish everywhere and some even swim with us as we swam around the coral. We have yet to find the lavender patch. Most of the coral here is cabbage coral with not much colour but the underwater life is amazing...giant clams, a few different corals that stand out and even the odd black or white tip reef sharks.
We have made ourselves know in 'town' already, the people at the newsagent/post office know us by name (surname anyway) as anything that gets sent here we have to pick up at the newsagent; we frequent the dive shop and bought a couple of things and got discounts already and they are always looking for people to do refresher courses for diving for their dive masters in training; the bakery is probably getting used to us coming in looking for jam and cream donuts and Fins Café have got used to Steve coming in asking for a flat white with three shots...at our shopping village!
We have changed our way of living a bit as we have not been used to having power 24/7, so we bought a double electric hotplate to cook on after we found out it cost us $24.50 to fill our 4kg gas bottle, we have our electric kettle and I am thinking about getting a toaster. We do spend a lot of our free time on the computer but that is getting less and less as time goes on.
We have done the 140km drive to Exmouth a couple of times now to do the shopping, top up Steve's beer and wine supply (that doesn't last very long) and generally get out of the caravan park for the day. They were rained on very heavily as we were, more so I think and the water was still sitting around on our last trip up there creating instant lakes on the usually dry beds of sand.
The landscapes on the side of the road were covered in green and for the first time we see flocks of sheep and goats on the side of the road having the feast of their lives. We stopped into a couple of memorial spots on the way into Exmouth to read up on a bit of history of WW11 in the area and take in the view.
We have been studying the map of the local area and found there are a few places close by (if we have a few day off in a row) that we can go to, so we decided to buy a few things on ebay. We bought two self inflating mats and a tent, we got both but the tent was the wrong one so we had to send it back to Sydney and we are still awaiting on the arrival of the correct one (we found it takes at least 10 days to get anything here from the east coast). So we are hoping to go camping in the surrounding areas and see something different and the weather is becoming very nice now to camp in away from the coast.
We have started to try our hand at the WA coast fishing and we have tried this before and found it very different to what we are used to in the east. First we tried at Moncks
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| new boat ramp and marina |
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| Moncks Point |
near the marina but it was a bit windy and got a couple of snags...once I got in the water and got my tackle back but not the second time.
Then we found a place called Five Fingers Reef and I caught 6 fish but only kept one 'dart' and Steve caught zero.
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| view toward Turtles Cliffs from Five Fingers |
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| The track out onto the beach at Five Fingers |
Last Friday we went to Mauds Landing and fished in 3 different places and did not get a bite and so we went back to Five Fingers again and got about 12 fish between the two of us but again no keepers. Although Steve did catch a parrot fish but we weren't sure of the size limit so he threw it back.
At Five Fingers we keep catching the same fish and we don't know what they are so we haven't kept any.
This day I had a great time just looking at the sea life while we were fishing...the star fish rolling around in the waves at my feet, the 2 metre stingray (only a metre away from my feet) stirring up the sand looking for something to eat and the turtle that swam under my fishing line as I was waiting for that illusive fish and all the while taking in the beautiful ocean view. (At the end of the day back at the van we found that there is no size limits on parrot fish in WA...you learn something new every day, I wish we learnt this yesterday).
Saturday Matt and Cris from work talked of fishing up at Mauds Landing so we thought we would join them. We met Matt and he had just lost a fight with a fish on his line probably a tailor and Cris turned up soon after us. The boys both had lures and we had squid. Steve changed to a lure after Cris was running up and down the beach casting his lure and ending up with three trevally. Matt went home empty handed to cook his hamburger, I stuck with the squid and kept catching weed with chunks of coral attached which was a work out just trying to pull my line out of the water but we had no luck, fortunately Cris shared one of his fish with us...he probably felt sorry for the oldies who didn't really know what they were doing hahaha. We must agree the fish here are very tasty. Last night we went to the mariner to try sqidding and no luck again but we will keep trying...one of the perks of living here, we are surrounded by ocean and plenty of time to practice. The only thing I caught was a cloudy sunset on film.
Lucky for us Cris shared his catch as our larder is getting low. We do have a couple of general stores here but if we don't go for a drive to Exmouth (140km) on our day off we order our groceries online from Woolworths in Carnarvon and get them delivered by courier. I have done this twice, the first time not 100% successful...1 banana instead of 8, two large bags of dry roasted, with skins, cashews instead of one small pkt of raw cashews and 2 lots of pork steaks instead of one. I anxiously wait for the delivery tomorrow as when I ordered I missed the place where I had to leave the delivery instructions for the courier and when I rang the customer care line to add the instructions, guess who I spoke to...yep someone in India!
Our highlight for our stay so far as most of you might know was our swim with the whale shark. It took about 4 hours of us in the tour boat floating around back and forth till the spotter plane called with a siting, the only bummer about this was everyone was a bit hungry and the staff had just put a beautiful meat and salad out on the table for lunch and it was quickly whisked away back into the galley as we had to hurriedly get organised to get into the water for the one thing we came out here to do. We were divided into 2 groups and one group at a time we slid into the ocean off the boat's marine deck got our eye on the shark coming towards us and had to quickly decide to go to the left or right of the shark and snorkel along the side of it for about 5 minutes and then the other group gets in the water and the boat comes around and picks us up and we have a rest on board then we do it all over again, we did this four times. It was all very hectic but such a rush. The shark was about 6 metres long and very surreal, we only had the one shark and we had to share it with another tour boat but such fun, we are hoping to do it again before the season finishes. It is has been our highlight so far and it is what we came back here to do...and it was AWESOME!!!
I don't think our lifestyle will be changing much from this for the time being...the managers want us to stay here for ever but we will wait and see...but the thought of the idea is tempting.
Cheers
Andy and Steve
