This has been a catch up week with no major adventures. Catch up from what you may ask; and I may not
be able to tell you ??
The markets on Sat and Sun were good and better than we
expected. Carol sold a lot of dresses, rompers, hair clips, and hand towels.
And also took some orders for more dresses that she has made and delivered
already. We were concerned about the
heat but were given a shady spot both days and the customers came out. There have also been plenty of orders coming
in from Facebook which have kept the sewing machine running hot. Garry has been very supportive by getting out
of the way and fitting in 3 days fishing and a game of golf. I saw some great fish caught but nothing to
report from my line. I did land a fish
but did put it back to grow bigger. The
golf course is like much of the north west; the approaches look like dry burnt
scrub but once on the course it is a little gem. The clubhouse sits on top of a hill with
great views over Roebuck Bay and the port and the golf course over the other
side of the hill has fairways and greens that any city course would be proud
of. The green lush grass is cut at several
heights and is beautiful to hit off and the greens run very true and fast. The only difficulty I had on the first few
holes was learning to not hit the green with the approach as the red sand
mounded green has a good 5m of bounce in them yet felt soft to walk on.
We had booked a double decker bus tour of the town when we
arrived and our turn came up on Monday.
This was very informative and gave us some good info about the town and
its history. The seabed cable connecting
Australia and England was laid onto Cable Beach (hence the name) from Indonesia in 1878. Two years later they laid another one as
cyclones had broken the first one too many times. The pearling industry was a difficult time
for the locals with many aborigines forced to work as divers until the Japanese
divers arrived and virtually took all diving jobs overnight. There are still several of the old Diving
Masters homes surviving in Broome; some even refurbished to their former glory
with new materials but same old look.
Broome was bombed several times during WW2 and there were similar
numbers of lives lost as in the bombing of Darwin. There were a large number of Catalina
Flying-boats based in Roebuck Bay and they were the target of the Japanese
attacks. Most of the planes were sunk
with approx. 145 lives lost. At very
low tides you can still see bits of the wrecks but we spent more than an hour
walking across the mudflats at low tide and the closest we came to wreckage was
a couple of concrete mooring blocks on the sea floor several hundred metres off the beach and hundreds of metres still from the water. The tide was out more than a
kilometre when we walked out and was a spring tide of 9.5 metres so we didn’t
hang around too long that far off shore.
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| Boabs on the Town beach - catalina wrecks out there somewhere |
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| The Broome Pier, Garrys favourite fishing spot is the walkway on the RHS. Cruise ship fill the end of the wharf up when they dock. |
On the low tide the next morning we were out of bed very early and went
in search of the dinosaur footprints in the rocks at off Gantheaume Point. This is a point at the SW end of Cable Beach
on which a lighthouse stands. We
scrambled down the cliffs/rocks into the low tide area and wandered across to
about where we thought the first of the foot prints should be. Another tourist came straight over to ask us
if we new what we were looking for?
Garry replied “those things”. We happened
to be standing beside a rock with a very clear footprint in it about half a
metre away – pure luck. The other 2 sets
of prints were much harder but after an hour of searching we had located them
all just before the waves were making it clear that it was time to head for
higher ground. At the top of the cliffs
there is a bath tub that collects water in the big tides and warms up in the
sunlight. One of the original lighthouse
keepers had it built for his arthritic wife. Soaking in the warm water helped
apparently. Sitting in a pool on the end
of a cliff looking along Cable Beach for as far as the eye can see while
marveling at the beautiful colors of the stone around the bath would have
helped a bit methinks. The sandstones
have the brightest reds, greens, whites and yellows in layers that are like nothing we
have seen before. The color of the
corals that came out of the water at the very low tide are also very bright on
the drab black/brown rocks.
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| A good dinosaur footprint at low tide |
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| Pretty coral exposed for less than 1 hour |
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| Modern lighthouse atop orange cliffs |
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| Orange rocks with ironstone flow |
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| Amazing colours right to the cliff top |
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| Anastasia's Pool - we were facing miles and miles of Cable Beach |
We headed home for breakfast and moved the van onto another
site in the same park. While we had
excellent morning and afternoon shade, we moved to a site which has full shade
all day and we decided it will be better when the van is locked up for the next
12 days; Darwin and work here we come.
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