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Published: August 5th 2008
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It continued raining on our drive out of Exmouth and we decided to give Coral Bay a miss. Although a nice town with superb diving/snorkelling (Alex and Mark visited there in 1998 with Mark's dad when we travelled back from Perth to Darwin after our 2 and a half years in Fiji), the bad weather meant that snorkelling no longer appealed to us! So we headed into Carnarvon, arriving in the afternoon, by which time the weather had cleared nicely. We stayed at the Coral Coast Caravan Park, the closest park to town, which was nice but the rain had obviously also fallen here as the park roads were littered with very muddy pools.
On Friday, we headed into the local library to try and catch up on some school work for Annelies and Thomas. Alex also bought a thermal vest! On Saturday we checked out a few of the local attractions, including the local markets where we bought lots of fresh fruit and vegies as well as some homemade jams, chutneys and sauces. We also walked the One Mile Jetty and visited the OTC Dish. The dish was built in 1966 as a satellite communications & tracking station, measures
29.6 meters in diameter, weighs 300 tonnes. and was involved in both the Apollo & Gemini space missions - apparently, Neil Armstrong's famous words "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" were relayed to the world via this station. On November 24th, 1966, Western Australia received its first satellite-transmitted television image via the dish. Saturday also saw us purchase some seafood - scallops for entrée with prawn stir-fry as the main course, as well as some Crimson Sea Perch for another day. As you can see we are doing it rough...
On Sunday, we did a day trip up the coast, stopping at the Blowholes, HMAS Sydney cairn, Cape Cuvier and Red Bluff. This is a spectacular part of the coast, with huge rugged cliffs and white sandy beaches against a blue ocean back drop. While checking out the Sydney cairn, we spotted a whale passing by. Although it was less than 50m from the cliff shoreline, by the time we raced closer to the edge of the cliff, it had moved a bit further away, so we never got a really close up look at it. It was very exciting, nonetheless. Presumably, it was
a humpback whale migrating northwards. A little further up the road we saw a few pods of dolphins amusing themselves, also just beyond the breaking waves. Mark also wanted to check out what was left of the Korean Star as he had seen it not long after it came to grief back on 21 May 1988 - Cyclone Herbie hit the area and the Korean Star, which was waiting to be loaded at the nearby Dampier Salt works at Cape Cuvier, was blown onto the rocks at the bottom of 60m cliffs where it broke into two. Over 20 years ago, on his transfer to Darwin, Mark had stopped off for a look a couple of days after the cyclone had passed through. Unfortunately, there is now very little left of the wreck.
Lastly, we visited Red Bluff, renown for it's long and clean left hand barrels. Although the swell wasn't huge, the winds were offshore (but very strong) and a reasonable set would roll in every few minutes. We also saw another humpback whale off in the distance, but it was well out to sea. After a picnic lunch we headed back to Carnarvon.
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