Ningaloo Reef - Week 2
We've really settled into life here. The weather has been fantastic despite Perth being hit by temperatures which are 8ᵒC below average and lots of rain. But today we have cloud, wind and a touch of rain. Tomorrow is looking better on the weather forecast.
Our campsite from our boat!
Bobbing around near the outer reef
The sunsets are just amazing
The perfect location for an Aperol Spritz or two
The water is the same colour as our mat!
Jayne has had some luck with fishing, catching 2 little ones. Nothing big enough to eat though.
Jayne's first catch - a pretty reef fish
Jayne's second catch - edible but too small for the 2 of us
I'm yet to catch a fish - I get lots of bites but nothing holds. The fish here are smart - they grab the bait, them swim under the coral and you end up snagged. By the time you get your line free, the bait is gone, and the fish has had a feed.
Bailey swimming with his life jacket on
There's fish out there Dad!
Staffy's are known for "talking" and he sure does plenty of that in the boat
Bailey enjoys fishing, but we've had to leave him behind as he gets too excited when we're casting and we're concerned he'll snap a lure or end up with a mouthful of hooks.
He still gets a scenic ride in the boat though.
When we leave him to guard our camp, he wears his special homemade Ningaloo identification collar in case he goes walkabout.
He never does though, and is always waiting faithfully for us to return
Ningaloo Station managed to shuffle the bookings so we don't have to move sites on Monday, which is a great bonus for us as we're on the best site in the place. Lucky us!
We're worried about the weather down southern Western Australia. The amount of rain they are getting now, plus the forecast for next week looks terrible, so our plan to head south from here may change. Broome is looking pretty tempting, then home via the Tanami Track. We're confident the weather down south will improve and that we won't have to do this. But if it doesn't it's going to be hard to head south into rain!
We drove to Exmouth the other day for supplies. It took us 2.5 hours each way driving from here! We won't ever do that again and we made it back just as the sun was setting.
One of our neighbours has been giving us fresh squid to eat. We made salt and pepper calamari which was nice, but a bit tough. We have to perfect the cooking of them. We have more from him now, so we'll see how we go with this one. Otherwise it'll be used as bait! He tells us if we chill it or even freeze it, that it will improve with a few days and be nice and tender. We'll try this.
We have another week here, we'll leave on Saturday 30th heading south we think!