Exmouth to Ningaloo Reef, Western Australia
Today, we curve around the northwest cape, and camp along the beach at Ningaloo Reef.
It's a fairly relaxed day. We woke up, had tea and cereal, and headed over to the CALM office at 8:30 to try and get a campsite on the other side of the peninsula... but it was closed on this Saturday morning. A woman in the parking lot asked if she could help, and soon she was calling on her HF radio to the entrance gate, who said, sure, he'd hold a spot for us at the Kurrajong campsite! Excellent.
We drove straight over there, and into the campsite... ten sites, and thankfully generators aren't allowed, so we'll have only the sound of the surf in the evenings. Our camp hosts, Frank and his wife, greeted us warmly, and gave us good snorkeling tips: there's a long rock wall that extends out to the outer reef just 300 meters north along the beach, and with no wind today it'll be a good day to go check out the reef. I'll have to go snorkeling this afternoon.
Though Frank was nice, the campsite was OK, but nothing great. It was open and exposed, no shade, which made Chris even more depressed--he's not to thrilled about camping at the beach to begin with. I offered to set up a shade tarp after we set up the tent. We also discovered that I had left my pillow back in the motel room. Grrr... and after doing a quick calculation, figured that it'd be just as expensive to buy a new one as it would be to drive back the 70 kilometers to get it. So we drove back into town, and then stopped at the Visitor Center. They had quite a good reference library in back, where Chris and I spent an hour looking up various things about Cape Range and the plants we saw yesterday. I've been able to identify most of them, but the hibiscus like flower that we saw is still not identifiable.
We then came back to camp; Chris read and I snorkeled. I was surprised at the reef. Here, it's about 800 meters or so offshore... but the inner lagoon just offshore is shallow enough to stand up in all the way out to where the waves break! Not only is the water shallow, but it's warm as well, perhaps 27C or so. Most of the lagoon is sandy, but there are various bommies of coral with quite a few fish around them. I saw all the usual suspects, plus a few I didn't recognize. The fish weren't as abundant as they were in New Caledonia, but there were just as many as there were on the Great Barrier Reef... and the corals were pretty colorful, too, including a deep purple coral and a brain coral.
After snorkeling for a couple of hours, we made dinner. Our campground host Frank had caught a bit too many fish, so he offered us an extra couple smaller fish that he called 'northwest snapper'. I was really wanting to eat them, but Chris was quite against it, saying the dirty dishes would smell up the car. Bah! We didnt' have anyting to fry them in, so we went over and bummed a frying pan off Frank and fried the fillets in a bit of peanut oil, with a dash of salt and pepper. My were they sweet and tasty. Fresh fish is good eating.
Weird Wildlife Sighting
Snorkelling this afternoon, I saw a sting ray--it was grayish, with lots of blue and orange spots!