Port Lincoln to Yorke Peninsula – 7th Feb 2018
Unfortunately we had missed “Tunarama ” in Port Lincoln by a day . This is the annual Tuna festival that the fishing town celebrates annually. I reckon my experience in whanging wellies at various fetes in the UK may have paid off in tossing a Tuna off with success .” I coulda been a contenda.”
I did however have an amazing tuna steak salad at one of the beach front restaurants.
From there down to Lincoln National Park and September Beach for two very windy and cold days. Too windy for fishing ( bait flying back at me ) and too cool with the wind to comfortably sit out ( not allowed a fire due to fire ban season) .
So it felt a little like UK camping – tucked up inside reading books and playing board games. Backgammon is the game of the moment . Kate is a sprint tactician and Im more of your prime wall exponent.
From there back to Port Lincoln in the morning and 2 hours in Maccas utilising free wifi and getting up to date with emails , this blog and a telephone reference for someone i used to work with . If reference giving was paid work I would have earned well over the last 6 months !
Then we meandered up to Port Gibbon stopping off for lunch at Tumby Bay and a walk along their rickety jetty.
Port Gibbon is a loose cluster of fishing shacks and houses with good beaches and 5 bucks a night campsites. The first night was very windy but the sunset with the fast moving clouds with the weather change coming through was out of this world .
The farmers in this part of the world have a real arty streak to them Point Gibbon meets Funky…..
We visited Cowell which is next town around the bay where we visited their local museum and I had my first successful crabbing session off the jetty. Three nice Blue Swimmer crabs just over the legal size. As ever with crabs , hard work eating but tasty. The crabs seem to be hitting the jettys across the area and there were a few out for this free feed.
The rocks here had a 1970s psychedelic feel to them !
We had read on a blog that there might be a small fur seal colony around the bay from us where sand dunes met the sandy beach and ocean. So we headed along and found a pod of dolphins so captivating that we nearly stepped on these two big rocks and one of them rolled over and yawned !
The free street library had some interesting books but despite them being free and me in need of a book i gave them a miss !
They also had some crap art – basically local artists work displayed in the shire crapper that you could purchase – novel but weird .
Next we headed north to Whyalla – which is a strange sort of town – it had a feel of a holiday resort on the western side but the east was dominated by huge iron ore smelters and the loading of super tankers with iron ore to the tune of 14 m tonnes per year.
The sunrise of the foreshore in front of the caravan park was none too shoddy
From an industrial pitch to a remote one found after about 25 ks of off road tracks a few ks of which were pretty rough. This got us to Tiparra Rocks which is on the coast line between Whyalla and the Yorke peninsula and despite the name was nestled behind some sand dunes.
We had the campspot and long beach to ourselves and Kate practiced he gymnastics in the sunset.
Here is the cartwheel queen in action.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvWlcxlhGpo
We headed down to the heel of the yorke peninsula and after a brief exploration of the lovely Yorketown we set up camp at Troubridge . Perched about 40 metres on top of the rock cliffs we had our own wooden staircase down into a cove and beach. From there i had a great time tackling shoals of 30cm salmon that moved through the cove . The basic pattern went along the lines of sitting in my chair with a beer and a pair of polaroids under the awning looking down into the cave. On seeing a shoal from my perch i could grab my rod and lure and i could be intercepting the shoal as it slowly moved towards land. As i say most were around 30cm but a couple were a bit bigger and ended up chopped into chunks chillie floured and fried with fettuccine.
