Exmouth and Coral Bay

 After all the fishing and snorkeling we thought we might do some bush walking at Mandu Mandu Gorge.  It was a great walk with some great views. Mountain goat country but it was a good change.

 Fishing at Cape Range National park was pretty good. Unfortunately the wind was pretty strong on a couple of days. But on one morning a neighbour at the campsite Darryl and myself went fishing. Just by luck we met Darryl, Dianne and their son Tim at Cooper Pedy and Uluru. Dianne and Sue work at the same Hospital and we kept in touch with them during our travels. They heard about the Mesa campsite with its shade and good tree coverage from the wind and we both organised to get a site next to each other. Anyway both Darryl and I caught plenty of fish but kept two. This fish I caught and it put up a good fight was a big eye Trevally. It doesn't look that big but it was somewhere between 50 and 55 cm's. We all ate it for dinner that night and it tasted great so with three hungry boys and Sue and I it was a decent size. So I thought, until we got to Coral Bay.

 Once leaving Exmouth we arrived at Coral Bay, which is about 200 km's south of Exmouth. Like Exmouth, Coral Bay is known for it's snorkeling and fishing. It has a pretty little cove which is sanctuary zoned which you can snorkle in and they also have fish feeding at 3.30 p.m. every day. Big fish called Spangled Emporers come in, in droves and you can hand feed them. They are said to be excellent eating but the boys and I knew we had to be patient as we had booked a fishing charter a couple of days later. Sue and Benjamin had booked on the same day a coral reef cruise as they are not as much into fishing and Benjamin has not been able to snorkle out in the deep as the rest of us have. So we were all excited. We also visited a part of the cove which baby reef sharks live in before they venture out into the big open sea. The reef sharks are almost harmless but none of us were going to enter the water. We saw many baby reef sharks in the shallows.

The next day Sue and Benjamin went on their cruise and they saw some fantastic colourful fish and coral. Benjamin announced that his favourite fish was the colourful parrot fish and Sue was impressed with the coral and with some areas of coral named Lavender Patch and Ayers Rock (you can guess what they looked like). Sue and the boys and I plan to snorkle over this area in the days to come. Sue used the video camera to record some of this action so unfortunately I haven't worked out how to download small parts of our video footage to the blog as yet.

Liam, Jake and I were picked up at 7 am from our caravan park by the fishing charter bus. There were about  12 people in total. As we left the pier in this big boat the last thing I thought of was sea sickness, as it was so calm and little wind was blowing. That all changed as we motored over the reef and into the ocean. Liam said he had a sore stomach and I knew what that meant, I then started getting the sweats. The boat was rocking from side to side and the trip out to the deep reef where we were to fish was to take an hour and a half. I tried to ignore sea sickness but finally was overcome with a need to vomit. As I got up to vomit over the side of the boat trying not to spray people in the process, the boat took one of its violent rocks. I landed face first on the boats deck and picked myself up with some assistance and sat in a place trying to get as much fresh sea air as possible. I probably spent 1 hour trying to focus on the horizon, but there is no place that can help you when you have sea sickness. After an hour Liam succumed to the sea sickness. Both of us sat next to each other feeling rather bloody awful. As we stopped at the fishing spot Jake joined us and said he was not feeling well. This fishing trip was beginning to be a nightmare as we were going to return to shore at about 4p.m and it was about 8.30 am. After vomiting I felt a bit better and Jake and I started fishing. We caught two fish and all the time I was trying to not vomit. Jake was past the worst of his seas sickness whilst Liam was just reaching the peak of his, vomting a couple of times. It must have been scary for the fish coming up as I dragged them up from about 100 meters in depth and they arrive out of the water with a big hook in their mouth and an 11 year old vomiting near them. It's good to laugh about it now but it was rather nasty at the time. Anyway at about 10.30 am,  I had one more vomit and started to beat the effects off, Jake was back to normal and Liam soldiered on. We fished at about another 4 or 5 spots and we  caught some great fish. Goldband snapper, Tomato cod, honeycomb cod, and a Robinsons seabream. The biggest being the Goldband snapper which we caught 4, all of them exceeding 80 cm's with the biggest being around 90 cm's. Liam hauled this in which is a testiment to his courage under much duress. Jake was reeling in a lot of catches as some of the crew gave him a turn of there rod when we were quite. As we returned to shore we all were glad it was over and happy with our catch. Even with being sick we all had a great day. In total the crew caught about 50 fish, we kept 8. The fish can bee seen below. As the charter finished we rondevoued to the fish cleaning spot with the crew to fillet and bag our catch up. With a quite beer, softdrink for the two boys, we enjoyed taking some photos of our fish. After the fish was filleted we had quite a hall. We will be eating fish for dinner for at least the next week. We had the goldband snapper last night and it matched the taste of Barramundi. The kids loved it. There's nothing better than freshly caught fish on the bbq to make you appreciate a fishing trip.

A memorable day, some of these photo's are worth their weight in gold.

                                               Jake holding a Goldband Snapper

                                                 Liam holding a Goldband Snapper

                                            Me holding a Robinsons Seaperch

                                   Liam holding a tomato cod and Jake with a honeycomb cod

                                                 Liam holding the fish he reeled in.

Me with the biggest snappers of the day, that we caught. Each fish provided us with 6 large filleted steaks of tasty meat. Good with a beer or white wine. Not a bad day at all. I think we are now half way through our trip. It's going to be hard to top the 1st half but time will tell.

We are next in Monkey Mia and then Kalbarri which will take about 10 days then 3 weeks in Perth to stay with Sue's mum. The boys are looking forward to getting back to creature comforts and my home made pizza's. I must admit as much as I have enjoyed camping Sue and I will enjoy the change. But one thing that our creature comforts at home will never beat is the great view of the stars you get when you have a wee in the middle of the night, it is spectacular. Anyway bye for now.