Oh my god, I thought it was windy in Safety Bay. We were woken up initially at about 11 last night with the beginnings of some quite heavy rain. That was cool, no worries at all. Then the wind started. At about 3am I actually thought the caravan was going to blow over, or the annexe and awning would rip off the side of the caravan and fly away ala Dorothy’s house style. Holy crap, that was some pretty scary shit! Matt ended up going out at about 4 or 5am to tie down the annexe with some rope, just so it felt a bit more secure and wasn’t going to fly off. Thank god everything was ok, we’re pretty happy with the way everything’s still attached as it should be!
So after that, we had a bit of a late start to the day. Matt put some wood under the hot water tanks outside the showers and lit a fire for our hot water at about 8am. I was surprised at how hot the water actually was, even though it was extremely salty. We decided to head up to Red Bluff, the other campsite we were talking about meeting Craig and Dale at, and as we were just about to get there they were coming down the track towards us! So, we’ve spent a lovely day with them, went up the coast a bit to the turtle sanctuary, didn’t see any turtles though. : ( Matt and Craig did a bit of snorkelling, but the water was murky because of all the wind. I swear it hasn’t stopped here all day, but at least it’s not as crazy as it was last night!
Craig and Dale have been at Red Bluff for a couple of nights, and said they sat around yesterday afternoon watching whales cruise on past their campsite (in the water, of course!). Craig showed us the photos they’d taken, and the whales were so close to the shore you could have easily swum out to meet them, if you were allowed to of course. We sat around for an hour or more at Red Bluff when we got back from our day trip, and watched some of the largest members of the ocean blow water out of the sea. No more spectacular aerial manoeuvres from them, but it was still pretty cool.
While I think about it too, we’ve been told that you don’t get notified when we put up new photos on the website, so we’ll just make sure we mention it in the blog when there’s new ones and you can go to the website and just check them out from there. Sorry for the confusion, we didn’t realise it wasn’t going to work that way. There are some new pics up there from today for you to check out.
We’ve made plans to meet up with Craig and Dale in Newman in 10 days time, so we’re going to take our time getting there, chill out for a couple of days and get organised for the next leg of the journey. From Newman, we’re leaving the caravans and heading south to the Canarvon Ranges for a bit of a trip through there for a week or so. Then back to Newman, and probably north a bit from there. We’re so excited to be getting out to places like this, and it’s even better to have someone else to do it with!
We got back here (to Quobba) at around 5, after a quick stop in at Korean Star, a shipwreck off the coast. You can’t see anything from the shore, but there’s a big Rio Tinto operation happening near there (thanks for the tip, Craig!) that’s pretty cool to check out. (See the pictures on our website!). We’ve had a lovely dinner of whiting (thanks Dale!) and “chips” (sliced, cooked potatoes), and were supposed to be heading over to a nearby campsite for a few drinks and a bit of a chinwag with some fellow ExplorOz-ians, but we’re both too knackered so bed’s looking like a great option really soon.
Oh, that reminds me, Mum, you’ll love this one, and Dad you’ll be so proud! I bought a stack of Bali DVD’s with us that we hadn’t watched yet, so we thought we’d break one out last night. We started watching The Boat That Rocked, I fell asleep, and got woken up at the end of it when Matt was having a sad because the end of the movie wasn’t on the DVD! If I wasn’t half-asleep at the time, I would have laughed! : )
