Advertisement
Published: November 4th 2009
Edit Blog Post
Day 188 - Coral Bay
A big birthday shout out today to a young man currently transforming the garden at our home in Moira! Happy Birthday Dad! Hope you’re enjoying your special treat and we hope you have a great day. We’ll speak to you soon and we might even sing! Our first morning in Coral Bay and it is just gorgeous! The sun is shining and although the wind is up a bit it’s no more than we’ve been used to after our time up on Cape Range!
We sat around a bit this morning updating some of the blogs and generally trying to catch up. Darryl helped a couple of people who were having troubles with their car and he worked with Mark on fixing the gas piping in the camp trailer. It was a pretty relaxing morning!
Myself, Dar and Bel went to check out the recommended snorkel spot here along Paradise Beach. We cycled out there with Bel on Lachies bike - pretty funny as she didn’t really fit but managed it beautifully as she does everything else! The snorkelling was good but we soon realised how spoilt we’ve been with the marine
life we’ve seen further up the coast. But it’s still pretty interesting and let’s face it, some snorkelling is better than no snorkelling at all!
There’s a huge, enormous brain coral here which Bel was tempted to sit on (but didn’t!) and there are small gatherings of fish but it was a bit choppy today so the visibility wasn’t great. The water was warm though so Bel stayed in for quite a while, being pommes the cold water doesn’t bother us at all! We find a lot of mushroom coral and Bel picks up a bit from the ocean floor for us to have a good look at, one of the many benefits of snorkelling with a professional!
We could easily have stayed longer on the beach but thought we’d head back to camp to see what everyone else was up to. Relaxing, chilling out, lazing around - they weren’t up to anything much at all!
We mentioned
Geocaching the other day and having checked on the website I now know there’s one hidden here in Coral Bay. Geocaching is a global GPS ‘game’ where people have hidden a cache somewhere and then uploaded the co-ordinates onto
the website for others to go and find. The cache will contain ‘treasure’ of some sort so we take items with us to replace whatever we remove, that’s how it all works. I found the co-ordinates of ‘Crowded Coral’, the name given to the cache hidden somewhere around here, and plumbed them into the Reeves handheld GPS. We could see that it’s not a big walk so grabbed some of the kids and headed off.
Kenny was in charge of the GPS and took us wandering over the sand dunes and along the beach until we came to the spot indicated as ‘ground zero’ for our hidden treasure. It was great when the kids found it, everyone got to choose a piece of treasure and we put our replacements in which included a gas fitting, hair band, bouncy ball, postcard and a fitting for a water pipe!! Brilliant fun! There’s a log book in the cache too which contains messages from everyone that has previously found it, unfortunately it’s now full because the cache has been so popular since it was buried in 2004 but we purchase a new log book for it so everyone can continue to record
their messages.
While all this was happening the boys were out fishing again, trying their luck in the Coral Bay ocean. Yet again they had drama but this time it wasn’t the size of the fish they didn’t catch or even the sharks circling their ankles, it was instead a seagull trying to steal a rod! Nige had put down his $350 rod while he went to take some photographs. The next thing the rest of the boys caught sight of was a cheeky seagull soaring into the sky with the rod trapped in its beak. The bird had gone for the bait but instead was tangled in the line and when he took to the sky the rod went with him. Luckily Nige managed to untangle the bird so both it and the rod were freed but honestly, it wouldn’t happen to any other group of fishermen, only this lot!
It’s the scariest day in the year today, no not tax day - it’s Halloween! The kids made themselves masks or had their faces painted and the adults drummed up some tricks and treats should there be a knock at the door! When the little ones came
knocking at the Sweetie Pie caravan they had to work for their treat by digging them out of a bowl of flour with their teeth and bobbing for the apples! At the Reeves’ establishment they found a crazy old witch who would only give them a treat if they kissed her hairy wort and then at the Elliotts they had to scare the be-jesus out of Bel before getting a yummy tub of Nutella! We all had so much fun followed by an excellent night of laughter and great company along with delicious pizza's cooked up by Mark - what a star! The group camped next door to us joined in too which provided us with a bit of entertainment, they were quite a hoot in many different ways!
In the midst of all this we rang Dad K to wish him a very Happy Birthday and were astounded that despite ringing him on the mobile the money lasted for hours! We must have struck ‘cheap rate’ somehow but it was great to have a long chat and to find out all was well back in the UK.
And that was that! The Elliotts are leaving us tomorrow
to head for the station (sheep / cattle) at Williambury where they will be WWOOFing for a week or so. We’ve been invited to the station at Gnaraloo but it’s just that little bit too remote for us to go at the moment so we’ll keep our eyes and ears open for another opportunity shortly.
Love to everyone
Dar and Sar
Advertisement
Tot: 0.112s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 32; dbt: 0.0551s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
kangaroojack
The Ts
Waterproof... Not!
Thanks for the heads up on the camera casing, I was seriously considering it until you mentioned that, however I am planning on giving Andy my current Canon Eos and getting a newer model for myself, hmm.... I think the Sony will not be up to much underwater, it plays up terribly at the best of times, so something reliable is a must. We have dramas of our own today, we have a collapsed wheel bearing on the camper trailer, we have left it in Cape Hillsborough to pop into McKay to pick up a new hub and bearings! Cannot complain, she has done 50K on some terrible terrain so this is not too huge! Looking forward to having a proper read up and catching up on your blogs... take care KJ xx