Carnarvon to Monkey Mia

Carnarvon turned out to be a very pleasant seaside country town.  The Christmas Markets held on Saturday night were a success for Carol and worth her while. She ended up teaming up with another lady, Jean, and sharing her stall.  We had met Brian and Jean at Ned’s Camp outside Exmouth and ended up in the same van park in Carnarvon. The fruit and veges grown along the river flats either side of the Gascoyne River are welcome.  It is great to be able to buy reasonably priced fresh veges and fruit direct from the farm gate.  We took a couple of drives out among the farms and filled the fridge and added some jams and salad dressings to the cupboard.  There are heaps of bananas, table grapes, mangoes, strawberrys, tomatoes, corn, egg plant, capsicum, and chillies grown and available at the moment.  All of the farm irrigation comes from bores in the dry Gascoyne River bed which is a couple of hundred metres wide and in a few kilometres of where the river (bed) enters the sea.  When the river floods as it did in 2010 it breaks its banks and becomes kilometres wide.  The van park we stayed in is at least 2kms from the river and had more than a metre of water through it.  The other feature we found interesting is the huge shadecloth fences 7m high alongside the bananas and being used as wind breaks and the fully covered shadecloth greenhouses to grow the grapes in that are hundreds of metres long and wide – we would love to have been the hardware that made those sales.

We drove up to Point Quobba which is on the southern tip of the Ningaloo Reef.  There are small cliffs into the Indian Ocean and beautiful beaches and sheltered bays.  It is well known for its blowholes and they were very active.  The sheltered bay was a real surpise and had some of the best beach snorkelling I have seen.  There is coloured coral and huge numbers of fish and the coral is very close to the beach and in very shallow water.  The tides are small, only 0.4m between low and high at the moment, and the water once again was amazingly clear.  Even though it was a showery day, the snorkelling was great.  When I sat down to pull on my fins, the fish came and gathered around as if waiting me to join them in a swim.  The bay is a ‘Sanctuary’ area which means no fish or anything can be taken so they know they are safe.  There were also a couple of acres of large oysters on the rocks that were so lucky they were in the sanctuary area as well.  Just back from the blowholes on the road back to Carnarvon we searched for and found a monument erected in memory of Graham Law, Carol’s cousin from Yeppoon who was killed in a motorbike accident there in 1993.

Quobba Blowholes

More oysters than I could eat in a lifetime but protected!!!

Coral, cucumbers and clams in clear shallow water

Beaut coral and at the beach and in my best beach outfit just for Ben

Monument to Carol's Cousin near Pt Quobba 

Real Estate in Carnarvon has not been spoilt by mining boom yet and while there are a few very nice (expensive looking) newish houses on canal blocks, there are plenty of houses in the $200k to $350K price range.  I could imagine it being a popular retirement place for West Aussies if you didn’t mind the odd flood or cyclone.

We headed further south planning to stop before Denham.  We were on the road early and having called in to see the Stromatellites at Hamelin Pool and the repeater Telegraph Station from 1895 by lunch we headed on to Denham and were convinced by the nice lady at the Info Centre to go straight out to Monkey Mia.  The Stromatellites are rocky looking lump growing in the water around the shore of Hamelin Pool; which is not really a pool but the southern end of the inland one of the 2 capes.  There are huge seagrass beds supporting many dugong and also trapping salt in the bay.  The water is ‘super-saline’ but still clear as and the living organisms that built the stromatellites are a cyano-bacteria that is the oldest form of life on the planet and determined to have existed unchanged for more than 3,500 million years.  There are several varieties, lumps, columns, and mats.  The lumps and columns appear to stay in the water at low tide while the mats are exposed at low tide.  The mats grow at the rate of 1cm every 30 years.  It is therefore amazing to see the tracks of the wool drays that were brought across the tidal flats for to boats which have cut tracks into the stromatellites more than 60 years ago.  Given the living bacteria contains cyanide and the water is ‘super-saline’ we were surprised to see many small fish swimming amongst the stromatellites in a few centimetres of water.  The bay (Hamelin Pool) was a port for wool out and supplies in, and also a repeater station for the telegraph line up the west coast.  The building was built in 1895 and contains a really good display of old phones, exchanges, machinery and tools used since then.  There is a van park and a great little shop and tea rooms.  The shop is full of souvenirs and one of the best collections of ‘hippy’ clothes for sale I have ever seen; very quirky and unexpected seeing the shopkeeper is older than us.

Telegraph Station at Hamelin Pool

Stromatellites - and fish if you look really closely....

Wool Dray tracks through the Stromatellite Mats

2 of the 3 forms - column, lump, and mat

Tiny white shell beach surrounding Hamelin Pool

Monkey Mia is another beautiful beach side area at the tip of the inland cape and still has the dolphins coming in to shore to feed every morning for the last 40 years.  Carol got to watch 8 of them feed including 2 new babies only 3-4 weeks old on the first morning and actually fed one a fish the next day.  We also saw several cute small turtles swimming around the jetty.  Garry missed the dolphins the first day because he was out on the water enjoying  fishing trip but was there to watch Carol feed them.  

Lining up for dolphin feeding

Mother and calf 3-4 weeks old.

Carol providing fresh fish for brekky

Little turtles off the jetty at Monkey Mia

View of the beachfront from the Restaurant

Evening friend waiting for dropped bait...

Garry had booked a ½ day trip but the fish were a bit slow and ended up fishing from 8am till 3pm and brought home a lovely feed of blue band emporer and cod.  While we caught many fish we returned a high percentage back to the sea as there were near or just undersized.  We caught heaps of snapper but all in the 40-50cm range.  They were really nice looking fish but just under the 50cm limit – boo hoo.  We did have a bit of excitement landing 2 sharks both about 1.5 metres long.  They were fun bringing in and even more fun when we hauled one straight on board.  There were a few new dance steps created when the shark decided to show just how unimpressed he was about being looked at so closely by a bunch of fishermen – luckily no missing toes!!

Note the nice clear deck space where all the big brave fishermen were standing 0.4 seconds earlier - the skipper with the gaff was great at dropping it off the hook; by accident of course....

Our cod was beautiful for tea – you just can’t beat fresh fish.  Hooray – fish at last!!!