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Published: August 4th 2012
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Day 32 – Tuesday July 31
st – Quondong Beach
As we were sitting next to the tent, facing the ocean and reading our books having a lazy morning, a bloke came up from the beach and told us that there were whales swimming along. We grabbed the binoculars and ran onto the sand. Half way to the horizon we could see several small groups of whales in the sea, swimming North. They were blowing water, breeching and slapping their flippers on the water making a huge banging noise. We watched them for about an hour then decided to go fishing. We followed a man on the beach with his rod and joined him at his fishing spot, hoping to get some advice from him about how to rig to the rod and where to cast. He took Luke under his wing and told him what to do, then disappeared back to his tent as clearly the fish weren’t biting. Sitting on the rocks looking out to sea we saw a turtle swimming around. He would pop to the surface for a few seconds, swim around to say hello then duck back down under the water, looking for food
around the rocks we guess. Very cute. Just before lunch we spotted more sea life – a small pod of dolphins swimming south past us.
After diary writing and beach maths (count the number of grains of sand on the beach, divide by the number of whales seen this morning, minus the number of dolphins we spotted and times by the number of fish Luke has caught) and lunch it was time for some rockpooling. Yesterday Anna caught a small blue swimmer crab in the rocks using her bare hands and she was keen to go back and see if she could find a bigger one. The catching team made themselves busy in the rocks with bbq tongs and a bowl for the crab. Super catcher Anna asked Muscle Mark to lift heavy rocks to check underneath and lo and behold, they found a half-decent sized blue swimmer crab. It was carefully coaxed out of its hidey hole using the BBQ tongs and made its last journey up the beach in an orange bowl. As we had one rf two blobs of Telstra coverage we were able to google how best to cook up the crab. Just as we
were doing that our neighbour popped his head around the side of the tent with a big smile on his face. “We saw you go off fishing and didn’t catch anything so we were wondering if you’d like this”, and he thrust two bags of filleted fish into our hands. It must have been around 3kg of Spanish mackerel that they had caught that morning out in their tinnie (carefully avoiding all the whales). Yay, finally some fresh fish!
But the day was to get even better. Shortly afterwards another neighbour came by with a huge fish carcass. He explained that because it had been only roughly filleted there was lots of meat still on the bones. He offered us the carcass (minus the head) and advised us to wrap it in foil and cook it gently over the campfire. Fish galore. Plus the delicious crab meat that Anna had provided as an entrée. So that night we cooked up the fish skeleton on the fire and had fish, fish and more fish for dinner, eaten on the beach as the sun was setting. Oh yes, it was washed down by a nice chilled bottle of sauvingnon blanc and
lemon lime & bitters for the kids. A fantastic day J
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