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Published: November 13th 2009
Day 199 - Denham, Shark Bay
It was an early rise for us this morning as we wanted to phone home to check all had gone well with Dad K’s ‘super stent’ op. We got up at 5am figuring that would be 9pm in the UK and got quite a shock when Mum told us Dad was with her in the hotel in Bristol. Turns out the doctors have decided Dad needs to be super bionic instead of just plain ‘super’ and as such Dad is to have a heart bypass sometime in the next 2 months. All pretty worrying stuff from this side of the world and that but we hope the appointment comes through sooner rather than later so Dad can get back to his very active life and Mum can get back to planning next year’s adventure! We send all our love and we’ll be in touch soon.
We would like to wish a rather lovely yummy Mummy a Happy Birthday today - my beaut young cousin Emma. Happy Birthday Em, hope you have a lovely day! We hadn’t really decided if we were staying put in the caravan park for another day or not.
There’s a car park at the bottom of the hill and we had wondered about leaving the caravan there for the day while we went 4WDing into the national park. We forgot to ask a local if that would be ok and we’re a bit concerned that there are signs up saying ‘No Camping’ and us leaving the caravan unattended might be construed as ‘camping’! What to do?!
We decided to pay for another night in the caravan park so set about putting the payment in an enveloped addressed with a suitable message and then posting it through the letter box at reception as they don’t open til 8am. But there’s no letter box! For goodness sake! Where does their mail go?! We spend a few minutes tooing and froing trying to decide whether we leave the envelope in the key return box and then the office manager’s husband appears. Bright and smiley at 6.55am he happily accepts our envelope and we’re off on our day trip!
The Francois Peron National Park is 52’000 hectares of undulating sandy plains with the added driving delights of birridas, claypans! Good job it’s beautiful and only just up the road!
Up to the point of the homestead the track is suitable for most conventional vehicles but after that its sand or birridas all the way so we need to drop our tyre pressures from 26 in the front and 35 in the rear down to 18 all round. This will give us better traction with more of the tyre in contact with the ground, or at least that’s the plan! Reducing your tyre pressures also minimises damage to the tracks so it’s a sensible thing to do. All the rules seem to change when we drive through deep sand and since the early days of our Byfield Conservation Park
Much a croc about nothing expedition we are very careful to follow instructions and always check we have our compressor with us to re-inflate when necessary!
We did a bit of sand dune driving at Coral Bay but we were in a convoy then so had the additional comfort of back up in the shape of Mark with the Landcruiser, this time it was just us, PIE and the terrain! We’re heading for Cape Peron, the tip of the national park and about 40kms further out which extends the journey time somewhat. My heart
goes in my mouth a couple of times because the sand is very soft but both PIE and of course Darryl ease through it with no problems at all. Along with the sand terrain comes short stretches of birridas; claypans with a thin crust over a bog mire kept moist by ground water. Drivers are warned not to go off the main tracks in these areas as they will get bogged and the recovery costs will be high not to mention the scarring to the fragile vegetation. We of course stay well and truly on the tracks!
There are several camping opportunities within the park, we couldn’t have brought the caravan in but we could have spent the night here in the tent. Something to think about in the future and with the facilities being improved all the time (the BBQs are being replaced and updated) it’s a very appealing place to spend a night or two.
We arrive at Cape Peron and find the scenery is spectacular so we decide to take the dune walk across to Skipjack Point. We are treated to stunning marine life out in Shark Bay with dolphins coming right up to the
beach, dugongs out in the sea grass, turtles and the odd shark. Cormorants line up along the beach watching the show before them, it’s all very beautiful.
There are plenty of other birds around this morning too, we think it’s probably some sort of wren that is entertaining us with a very pretty song as we venture over the dunes crossing the numerous animal tracks from lizards and wallabies..
The dolphins are fascinating to watch, there’s a small family of three right on the beach and they’re being monitored by what we think is a research boat from Monkey Mia which is renowned for it’s study of the graceful creatures. Whether the boat gets too close at one point or the Mum dolphin is just in one of those moods we don’t know but several tail slaps indicate something has displeased or distressed her.
It takes us a while to walk to Skipjack Point, it’s hot and the sand makes it hard work. When we arrive we’re delighted by the view back across the bay, it’s truly breathtaking and well worth it especially with all the marine life we’ve been able to see. From the elevated boardwalk
we can see large Eagle Rays swimming in the ocean below us and plenty of turtles. We’re still keeping a watchful eye on the dolphins and as we walk back to Cape Peron we can see more of them joining the party!
The signage at Skipjack Point was really informative about the dolphins and explains why they were coming right up close to the beach, they were catching mullet for dinner or in this case breakfast! This is extremely unusual for bottlenose dolphins so we consider ourselves very lucky to have seen our wild performance this morning and we’re even more pleased that we didn’t venture down onto the beach because we may well have frightened them away from a very important meal.
The female dolphins pursue their favourite dinner of Mullet up and down the beach until they have worked them into the shallow water closer to shore. The dolphins lunge almost entirely out of the water to seize the mullet prize, surely a really dangerous thing to do if they get it wrong as they would be beached. This morning the female had her calf with her the whole time and it looked to be a
successful mission.
As we walked back over the dunes we could see even more dolphins joining the group and the smallest started to do back flips! We thought it must be something of a party trick but apparently it’s how they feed when they’re young, we’ll have to check that out as it sounds a bit too much fun. That would surely be like sitting your 6 month old on the floor with ice cream and jelly then telling them to get on with it themselves?!
Further along the beach we can see more action in the water but we’re not sure it’s dolphins this time, we think it could be a shark and if it is we think it might be having dugong for todays meal. Hopefully it wasn’t that at all but there seemed to be a certain amount of thrashing going on.
We left Cape Peron and journeyed south towards Bottle Bay. The lady in the visitors centre had told us that this was the best area for snorkelling in the national park. It’s a beautiful outlook and the coastline stretches all the way up to the cape but as we walk along the
beach we’re not convinced it’s the place to snorkel, especially when I spot a dorsal fin and it doesn’t look like it belongs to a dolphin! There’s the added concern about stonefish in the area which we are prepared to get around by wearing our crocs instead of our flippers but the potential company of a tiger shark I feel we can do without!
Whether we’re being cowards because nobody else is here, cautious because we are without Nige and Belinda our snorkelling experts or just plain sensible, we can’t be sure but we give the snorkelling a miss. If somebody tells us further along in our journey that it’s “the best place they’ve ever snorkelled in the whole world” well so be it!
Because we were up so early it’s meant that we’ve enjoyed this fabulous environment pretty much to ourselves so as our fellow tourists are driving towards us at just after mid-day, we’re quite happy to be exiting the park and leaving them all to it.
It’s not a short journey back through the sand and we stop to take snapshots on the birridas so all in all it probably took us over an
hour to get back to the homestead. We continue on without pumping our tyres up just yet, the roads are very good around here and as there are no rough gravel tracks we’re sure we’ll make it back without getting a puncture. We stop off at Little Lagoon for lunch using the lovely big shade that they’ve provided and we even venture into the water for a swim, with our shoes on of course! Darryl’s got his snorkel mask looking out for stonefish but we’re sure we won’t find any and we don’t.
Just below our camp site is the beach and a rather nice outlook so we drag our chairs down there for the rest of the afternoon and spend it catching up on our correspondence ie writing postcards! It’s a very peaceful place and the hours easily blow by in the hazy sunshine.
We need a couple of things so pop into the supermarket on the way back and part with a fairly large amount of money for not many items! Mangos are $5.99 each as opposed to $2.99 elsewhere, understandable we suppose considering the positioning of Denham and its relative remoteness, but still!
We
manage to catch up with Darryl’s brother Nick over Skype. Great to hear that his daughter Nikita had a really good 18th birthday party yesterday and we hope her Mum gets out of bed soon! Ha ha!
Congratulations to Darryl’s brother Wayne who we understand proposed to girlfriend Nicola, in a dentist waiting room! We assume he didn’t have to pull her teeth out to make her say yes! We wish you both lots of happiness and very much look forward to meeting this lovely lady when we get home.
And then the phone rang, it was Belinda from the Elliotts! They’re off the Williambury station and are now in Carnarvon with the Reeves. It’s fabulous to hear from them and to hear they’ve had such a great time out on the station. Infact Nige has got on so well there he’s been offered a job which is terrific news but not before they complete their journey to Perth which is great news for us as that means they will shortly be heading in our direction and with any luck we’ll either meet them in or just before Kalbarri. Here’s hoping that the plan comes together and the
Reeves family comes with them!
And there endith day 199 in this huge adventure. Here’s to Day 200 and all it may bring.
Hear hear
Dar and Sar
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Rita
non-member comment
feeling good.
Morning my Lovelies, I have been saving up your blogs to read when I had a spare chunk of time. Well I caught flu and have just read them all and feel better already. Pics are glorious. Your Dad will be fine Sare, my sis had it done. Back atwork in 3months feeling fitter than a butchers dog. Still a worrying time. You both look so healthy. Its blowing a hooly here so no walk for me. I will look at your pics again and dream. Take care and safe travels. Rita xxxxxxxxxx