Day 121 – 6/4/14 - Quobba Point WA

Why is it that when you are totally exhausted the night before you head to bed early and sleep really well until around 5am when your body says...”OK, that’s about enough for you time to open those eyes young man”. Oh well I did manage to finish my book!

We headed further down the beach to an area that looked promising for catching a few fish. There were Turns and Seagulls feeding on a massive school of bait fish so I thought it worth our while to have a crack. The beach was quite unusual and reminded me of Bells Beach, in that the sand was at about 45o and the waves dumped onto the sand only about 2m from the waters edge. I started casting and it wasn’t long before the boys were having a great time running down the beach, charging into the pounding dumpers. This then elevated into a freestyle competition where De had to score their dives, twists and turns while I continued to fling a shiny piece of metal with a hook attached to the end of it westward!

I managed one hit and then after about 40 minutes I was on. I was expecting a school mackerel or something similar but could feel the head shakes of the fish and I was a touch confused. Pretty soon I had landed a 43cm Morwong and was pretty surprised that it had taken my metal lure. Regardless  was happy to have something so went back to it. About 20 minutes later I managed to get one of my better tangles and set about fixing it. As part of the process I wrapped the line, that went to the lure sitting comfortably on the bottom of the ocean about 40m out, around my big toe so it didn’t pull on the line while I was trying to untangle it. This worked well until my amazement, 15 minutes later something decided it liked my stationary lure. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, said fish had caused the braid line to rub up against a rock and it broke! It is hard to wear thongs without a big toe so I guess I should be greatful!

We headed back for lunch and another lie down. I managed to sleep a little longer and De headed down to the ‘lagoon’ with the boys. Here they proceeded to go on a “Jelly Fish Hunt” where they collected the jelly blobs (without tenticles) in their shirts. In the end jack had 40 something and Sambo close to thirty both with a shirt now fit for a heavily pregnant woman. I arrived with the snorkelling gear and we headed out. I was amazed at the amount of coral and fish that were present, all 5 or 10m off shore from our $11/night campground. After having spent wads on accommodation and a small mortgage on getting to the reef from Cairns I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the reef. This bodes well as this is seen as the very edge of Ningaloo reef with the best yet to come! I have put together a short movie of the reef to give you some idea.


The rest of the afternoon was spent lazing around camp with the odd game of uno and some organising of the fishing gear. The boys are both having a ball collecting all of the left over fishing hooks, sinkers etc and have started their own collections. I think I may have tempted them into buying lures instead of matchbox cars in the next town...maybe a good thing, maybe a dangerous thing!

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