Sunday 24th
We left Carnarvon at 7:45am on our way to Coral Bay. The drive was interesting in the amount of traffic heading south, this weekend was the end of school holidays, so a lot of families must have been heading back south.
We arrived in Coral Bay around 10am and tried to book in to our site, but the people before us hadn’t left yet so we had to wait an hour. We had set up and were having lunch by 11:45am. Over lunch we decided what we wanted to do here, Deb wanted a Turtle tour and I wanted the Manta Rays. We found a tour that incorporated both, the only drawback was that the tour wasn’t running on Monday, but was on Tuesday, the day we leave. So have decided to do the tour on Tuesday and leave here in the early afternoon aiming to get somewhere around halfway to Karratha.
Sunday afternoon we took very easy. We went for a walk down
to the beach and around all the shops, just getting familiar with the layout of everything here. After a bit of a laze at the van we walked down to the beach at 3:30pm to see the feeding of the fish. It was amazing, these very good size Snapper (easily 18”+) and Parrot fish about the same size come in to be fed by hand. There were lots of them, 20 or more and they were swimming in amongst everyone’s
legs, the water was only knee high. As soon as the food had gone the fish were gone as well.
We had an early tea, crumbed Trevalli and salad, very nice.
We spent the early evening working out our plan of attack for the rest of the holiday. We have it down pretty well as we want. Now all we have to do is hope that there are good caravan parks with vacancies for us at all the destinations. There are sooooo many grey nomads up here it is crazy.
We have never been to a caravan park that is so full, this park has 158 sites and they have no vacancies, if you don’t have a reservation it’s a matter of hoping that someone doesn’t show, and if you want a powered site it pays to book well in advance. (needless to say we don’t have power!)
Monday 25th
We had a slow start again today. After breakfast I washed the van with a single bucket of water. It took about an hour and it looks 100% better than when we got here, at times I was wishing I was 6” taller, it would have made the whole job just that much easier. After that we sat around and relaxed reading.
Hey Dante, late in the morning I had a look on the Geocache App on my phone and found there was one in Coral Bay and only about 600m away, so we set out to find it. It was down by the beach under a boardwalk. It took a little searching and with a little bit of stealth we had the cache and recorded our find, our first for Western Australia. Hopefully we can find some more on our travels. Geocaching just adds a little bit more to our trips ever since we found out about it when we were in England way back in 2008,
thanks to Steve and Catrina and your girls. 🙂 Maybe we could find some near our place when you are out here. 🙂
Somewhere along the line we had the fridge turned on a wrong
setting and it hasn’t been real cold. Running it off the battery just isn’t doing it, and things are starting to defrost in the freezer. I hope we can work out what we did wrong! In the mean time it looks like I will be cooking up a whole lot of stuff tonight so it doesn’t go off and we can have it over the next day or so.
After lunch we got on the phone and started booking places
ahead. We now have confirmed sites at most of our upcoming destinations, so we are happy little Pilgrims. To be able to call out of here we have had to get a Telstra Sim card for our phone. We soon burnt up the first $20 we put on the card and have put more on. It’s Pat’s birthday tomorrow so we absolutely had to have the phone so we could call him. 🙂
Later in the afternoon I walked down to the beach and hired some snorkelling gear and went out off the beach. I was told that if I went
between 100 and 200m out the coral was much better, all of the close in coral is dead ( don’t know why) but there are still lots of fish around it. Out the back the coral was amazing, such brilliant colours, bright iridescent purples, oranges, greens and yellow. And the fish that were swimming and feeding around it were of equal
colours. It was so much fun to be able to dive down and swim in amongst the coral and huge schools of fish, most of which were a much larger than dinner plate size. Swimming back in there were large snapper only a matter of meters from the beach, and lots of them.
We spent the rest of the afternoon reading and then had an
early dinner.
After dinner we packed up as much as we could and sat back to relax for the night.
Tomorrow we do our snorkel tour and the drive north, aiming
to get to the Fortescue Roadhouse about 150km south of Karratha.
