Wednesday 5 September – I’ve had a couple of bulletins from home about the appalling weather, winds and power outages you are experiencing back in Victoria, so take care everybody.

Well, first of all, we had an undisturbed sleep, so the ‘allen key in the drilled hole’ system is working at this stage.    We woke at about seven, consequently it was a bit after 8.30 when we left Coral Bay for Carnarvon.  It was not a terribly interesting drive today, pretty flat, nothing stunning about the scenery, and until the last third of the drive, no roadkill.  Then we came across several kangaroos which had been collected on the road, most of them pretty recent, and they were attended by the usual murder of crows, the occasional hawk and once or twice, a wedgie - all hopping in for their chop.

Today we only drove about 240 km so we were here just before lunch and had the van set up before you could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious … a few times!  Once that was done we went into town (the park we are staying at is about 5 km out) and found the hospital where Grant had his required blood test and managed to maintain last weeks level, so that seems good to us.  He hasn’t been able to talk to his doctor yet, as he had a day off today, so tomorrow he’ll make any adjustments if necessary.  

By the time we had a bit of lunch it was after 2 o’clock, so we went for a bit of a drive – firstly to the one mile long jetty.  The longest jetty in the northwest of the state, it was used in the early 1900s as a deep sea port to transport local produce from the ships into the town. Steam and diesel powered wagons were used to transport the goods.  Now as today has been quite windy here as well as back home, and the wind was cold, we decided that we wouldn’t walk the jetty, and we weren’t sure we had time to do it either as Grant was getting two new back tyres installed at 4 o’clock, and there was a bit of shopping we had to do.  So instead of walking the pier we did the mangrove walk – a short walk on a made track which finished up on a bit of a platform over the mangroves.  From there we drove down to Pelican Point, a popular picnic spot here in Carnarvon, the across the other side of town to visit the Big Dish.

The Big Dish is a now disused satellite dish which measures almost 30 metres in diameter which opened in 1966 and was used for 21 years.  It was Australia’s first earth station for communications and for tracking satellites, and apparently is one of only eight in the world. I read that it was of major importance to global communications, was used for tracking Halleys Comet and was classed as an integral part of the communications network for the Apollo Moon project.  All I know is that it is very big and it was even windier there than elsewhere!

The Big Dish, Carnarvon

We wound up the afternoon by doing the shopping, getting the tyres put on, then back to camp for a cuppa and afternoon tea.  There are some sort of nuts/seeds falling off a tree hanging over our van and every five minutes we are hearing the ping as another one drops onto us.  At the moment the wind has dropped, so we’ll keep our fingers crossed that it will stay that way.