Tuesday 4 September – Well we had an interesting night last night.  It was extremely windy, and the canvas on the van was moving around quite a bit, then it started to rain, which it did intermittently throughout the night.  But the real point of interest was when the metal rod that supports the canvas roof over our bed fell from it’s supposedly locked in position (obviously due to the buffeting of the wind), not just once, but twice!  And this of course meant that the canvas fell down around our heads.  But to make matters worse, a couple of nights ago, when Grant was having his shower, he apparently went to fling his towel over his shoulder to dry his back, and somehow managed to connect his hand with the tap, causing something painful to happen in his left shoulder – which just so happens to have been his good shoulder.  And yes!  You’ve guessed it!  Both times the metal rod dropped from the roof it landed on Grant’s left shoulder.

So not only were we woken by being enveloped in canvas and by the clang of metal when it eventually hit the floor, Grant was shocked into wakefulness by a cracking blow from a metal rod onto his shoulder.  So after some consultation with the fellow in the van next door who happens to be an engineer, the decision was made to drill a hole through the rod where it fits into it’s little nest and then shove a nail or a screw in the hole and into the supporting roof beam, thereby anchoring it into place.  Grant just happened to have brought his drill with him, but no nails or screws, so it is currently anchored with an allen key.  And up until now it seems to be working, as the wind has sprung up again this evening, and so far it has held fast.

As a result of that we were up at 5, then 6.30 when we stayed up.  So much for the sleep-in I’d intended having this morning!  So that was the start of today.  The morning brought wind and a very cloudy sky, but the rain had stopped, so we thought our day at the beach would definitely be a non-event. 

After breakfast I gave Grant a haircut, sat out under the clearing sky and did some embroidery, had a cuppa, then we went for a drive.  Now there’s really only one drive you can do in the vicinity of Coral Bay, and that was a couple of kilometres south of the town to Maud’s Sanctuary zone where lots of restrictions apply to preserve the Ningaloo Reef.  So that’s where we went and boy was it worth it!  It was still blowing pretty strongly, but the water looked magnificent.  It was the most striking turquoise colour you could imagine, and the water was as clear as crystal.  We took a few photos, but I’m sure they don’t do it justice.

A couple of views of Maud’s sanctuary.

From there we came back into town and explored the shopping centre – very small, but the essentials are covered, bought a couple of fruit scones at the bakery for afternoon tea, then came back to camp. 

After lunch the cloud had largely dispersed so we decided that we would go over to the beach (just over the road from the caravan park) and see what we thought about getting wet.  It was still quite breezy, but we put on our bathers just in case we had a rush of blood to the head and decided to have a dip.  There were only a couple of people in the water, and the fellow member of that couple kept exclaiming – ‘It’s freezing!’ which wasn’t very encouraging.  After we had been there about an hour and a half we decided to give it a go, as it was showing signs of clouding up again.  So in Grant went, followed soon after by me.  It wasn’t too bad once you were in, so we stayed in the water for about twenty minutes during which time we were joined by half a dozen big emperor fish swimming about around our legs.  As a non-swimmer I was doing a bit of back floating, and I reckon it was saltier than most water, as I didn’t even have to try not to sink – I just stayed on top of the water!!

After our dip we came back to the camp and went and had another dip in the park pool.  The water in the park (and the pool) comes from a bore sunk down 800 odd metres, and the water comes directly from that bore at about 35 degrees Celsius, so it was just like having a warm bath.  Very nice.

We had our showers after the swims, then had afternoon tea and enjoyed the scones.  Now it is after tea, the wind is up again so we’ll see whether we have any sleep interruptions during the night tonight.  Tomorrow we move on to Carnarvon for a one night stand, and from what we hear on the grey nomad grapevine, the weather isn’t looking too promising as we move south.  Let’s hope it settles down in the next day or so, and Perth gets its current dodgy weather out of its system before the fifteenth!