The boys had been up late the night before, but usually that
doen’t adjust their waking time, but today it DID....Hip Hip Hooray! Sam didn’t
was until 7:45 and Jacko was still full of zzzs at 8:25...in what must be a
world record...for us at least. The only problem was that we had to have
breakfast, pack up and be at the Barramundi Discovery centre 15 minutes drive
away by 9:30 for the tour....action stations!
Amazingly enough we pulled out at 9:14 getting to the centre
with 2 minutes to spare. As a great back up to our fruitless drive to Karumba
yesterday, after all our frantic activity we arrived to find out it was $40 for
the tour. Kind of laughing at the irony of it all we turned around and drove
back to the point to launch the boat!
Karumba is supposed to be a fishermans heaven but by the
reports I was getting and the number of boats that i could see on the water I unloaded
Rufus with a certain lack of optimism. We were ahead of the pack, as it was
still three hours till high tide, so we had the choice of where to go.
We headed out towards the shipping channel hoping to find a
hole, only to find the wind blowing straight up the channel was rolling up some
pretty nasty little waves that were way too big for us to sit in. We punched
our way back to where we had just come from and anchored up off the ‘beach’ in
the river where a lot of people fish from.
Half an hour later Sam had managed
to catch a small grunter with Jack and I not able to loose our bait. We headed
out a bit further to a second spot where a few boats had gathered and another
half an hour later the anchor was being pulled with nothing to show. Again we
followed the crowd to a spot on the other side of the river mouth that looked a
bit more promising as there at least look to be some structure. 30 minutes
later and both Jack and Sam could both chalk up undersized grunters while I
still have the same bait! For a bit of fun we wacked some deep diving lures on
a trolled the channel and beacons knowing full well that I had as much chance
of catching a fish as getting a call from Ewan McKenzie asking me if I’d like
to strap on some boots for the next game. Predictably nothing happened!
The good thing about going out with low expectations is when
you expectations are met you achieve some kind of weird satisfaction out of it.
So we loaded Rufus on board, using the boat loader for the first time in three
or four months, had a scrappy lunch made from whatever we could find and hit
the road.
For the next two hours we headed south across the gulf’s
grassy savannahs. It is an amazing experience to be able to see an
uninterrupted horizon 240 degrees around you, no hills, hardly a tree in sight,
just grassy plains that fall into the shimmering reflective haze that is the
horizon up here.
We passed back through Normanton only pausing long enough to
get a picture at the ‘Big Barra’, the closest we have been to catching one of these things in the gulf!
We headed out of town and pulled
over to capture our last right hand turn of the trip. The first one had been on December 27th last year, south
of Geelong as we turned from south to west, then south of Fremantle we tacked
northward until we reached Broome where we pointed our rig back eastward. Our
last turn took us away from the Savanah Way spinning us back southward for the
downhill run back into Brisbane. This time in two weeks we will be waking up
again in our bed for the first time in 210 days.
We rolled on for what seemed like an eternity pulling into
the Bang Bang rest area. I was kind of expecting Batman and Robin to be there
beating up their arch rivals but instead there was just 10 other gray nomad
vans set up for the evening. The boys rode while we chilled for a short time,
chatting with some fellow travellers as they made their way to do their
ablutions. Finally at 9:16 the last one turned off their generator so we could
enjoy the silence, except for the tip tapping of the keys on my laptop, having
FINALLY caught up to today on the blog! I think I’ll have a (another) rum to
celebrate!
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