Crab catching in Monkey Mia

Thursday 1^st May 2008

After having been exceedingly windy last night, this morning was all calm with not a cloud in the sky. The girls slept in til 7:30 after which Holly ate almost two pieces of toast for breakfast – what is going on?!

We hit the Telecentre so we could upload our blog (you may have noticed that four day’s worth went up at once...) and then Paul had his beard trimmed and hair cut while me and the girls checked out the Shark Bay World Heritage Discovery and Visitor Centre. I found it fascinating and, once they realised we wouldn’t be moving on so quickly, the girls also started to enjoy it.

We then picked up the boat (a little 4m thing called Shorty) having changed our hitch from a Trigg to a towball but not being able to connect up the electrics (since we now have the large, connect big stuff version). We were supposed to pick up a box of whiting fishheads from the fish factory but as luck would have it.... it was closed for lunch. After heated discussion (Paul had wanted to pick up the fish first but I said I’d rather get it after the boat so we could leave the smelly things in the boat instead of the car) we agreed to drop off Paul, girls and boat at Monkey Mia so they could potter around while I sped back to Denham and picked up said fishheads. As it turned out it was actually fortuitous since I had managed to leave the eski packed with lunch and snacks sitting on the counter in the camper trailer! And the fishheads were frozen and didn’t smell anyway...

Back at Monkey Mia, Paul and the girls had headed out to the pontoon and picked up the crab nets so my return was timely – I unravelled the many knots of the net ropes while Paul stuck fishheads onto wires in the nets and the girls fed the crusts of their sandwiches to the little fishes lurking in the shallows.

Back out on the water me and the girls had fun flinging the nets and their buoys into the water after which we spent a quick ten minutes on the pontoon with the girls checking out the jewellery they keep there before heading back to check our nets. Since we were moving fast into the wind Paul’s hat chose that time to fly off. After three turns around trying to fish it out we gave up – we didn’t have a boat hook and Paul’s skipper skills were not yet sufficiently developed to that level of accuracy.

As it turns out, he got a lot of practice this afternoon! With no boat hook we were relying on him to get us close enough to the buoys to be able to grab them. After a couple of goes the irritation turned to amusement for all of us – it didn’t matter – we were still having fun! The girls and I became adept at reaching out, reeling in, reapplying fishheads and chucking back in. Somehow we lost one of the nets – we couldn’t work out why but the only feasible explanation was that the guy in the other boat nearby (whose buoys were all much whiter and neater than ours and who laid nets and pulled them up in half the time we did!) must have pulled it in by mistake.

About ten goes with no success (mostly the fishheads were gone although sometimes only the eyes and guts had been eaten out) left us slightly disillusioned but then.... SUCCESS!!!! The girls were so shocked they nearly dropped it back in the water! The blue manna crab with a body about 12cm across wasn’t happy – scuttling all over the bucket, but we were delighted and it made the whole thing worthwhile. And there was one more little fella who joined his mate in our bucket so we made sure we had photographic evidence!

Heading back to the pontoon we ran out of fuel. Lucky we had the NextG mobile phone and there was coverage out there in the bay because it would’ve been a lonely night....! Our rescuers were straight out from the pontoon and we all heaved a sigh of relief as the engine sputtered into life once more.

And, as a bonus, we didn’t have to negotiate the trials of getting the boat out of the water and onto the trailer (getting it into the water had been bad enough!) because Jamie and some of his team came to shore at the same time and supervised it all.

We gave him a couple of cartons of Carlton MidStrength to say thanks but really it was nothing compared to the opportunities and friendship he had given us. He is off on a bike trip on off-road tracks to Steep Point in a couple of days and his greatest dream (at the moment) is to take part in the Paris-Dakar – man, is he crazy!

We dined at the Old Pearler restaurant in town – it’s a French style little place made of blocks of shells compacted together and the food was very pleasant – we were all ravenous, without having realised it, and polished off our food in no time – even H and K!

The weather is now completely calm and I expect they will open up the road to the Peron Peninsula tomorrow, although the tourist bureau people reckoned it wouldn’t be til Sunday. Whatever, we will miss seeing it since we need to keep moving and I am very sorry we couldn’t get up there.