Blogs from Onslow, Western Australia, Australia, Oceania

Geo: -21.6363, 115.112Wow there is sooo much going on up this way. There is a huge salt works here with its own jetty. They load the boats via a very long conveyor belt straight along the jetty onto the ship. There is also a boom with gas and the whole town has been taken over by construction/mining/salt workers. We were lucky to book into this park as it has about 50 or more dongas for workers. There is also 3 very large boats in the harbour which house workers and vans everywhere. Apparently this park had about 50 van sites before this boom, now they have about 19 sites left. They are building 60 apartments and heavens only knows what else.The beach is amazing. Millions of shells and when the surf goes over them it makes ... read more

In an attempt to keep the mind from all the "what if's" we thought we'd take this opportunity to share some of our most recent adventures, some possibly a bit mis-adventurous! While we wait for cyclone Iggy to grace us with his presence, above is the current "prediction" of Iggy's path, however we are well aware of the non-predictive nature of cyclones so we watch, and we wait! Yesterday was spent tying down, locking away, securing, putting indoors pratically everything not bolted down around here in readiness for some pretty serious winds (yes, Jase, even worse than in your undies!). The best site to go to if you want to keep an eye on this system is www.bom.gov.au where you can click on Current Warnings for WA, and it lists all the relevant pages you ... read more

After a couple of wage negotiations, we have signed contracts to an outback cattle Station! So once again, our short stay of about 5 weeks has turned into more like 5 months! Jeff has been enjoying his new role as "station mechanic" (the official job title) fixing all manner of machines & equipment - from a measley whipper snipper up to monster trucks! Early starts at 6.30am, an hour for lunch and beer oçlock at 5.30pm so quite long days, however there's been no mechanic here for 18 months so the backlog of work makes the day go by fast. Most interesting repair so far was a tyre change on a huge dump truck, you won't believe this but they light aviation fuel inside the tyre to get it back on the rim! Safety first, as ... read more