Warroora Station and Coral Bay

Conor and Ben's cowrie collection

Lunch with the Ralhs at Warroora Station

It’s getting warmer and warmer – Daniel and I even got out the summer pyjamas last night! Conor has grudgingly agreed to give up his thermals (he was actually sweating at night) but is holding onto his winter pyjamas. At least he’s gotten rid of one of his blankets. The water is also getting warmer, although the kids still want wetsuits on to get in the sea. This morning we packed up, left Warroora Station and drove through the beautiful big nothingness to Coral Bay. It was a bit of a contrast with where we’d come from in that it was absolutely teeming with people and cars. You can hardly call it a town in that it’s two caravan parks, a servo, a shop and a National Parks information booth but it’s absolutely packed. Probably because the sun was sparkling on the crystal clear blue water, that’s knee deep for quite a while and then drops off right when it hits the reef, which is only 50m from the shore again. Obviously people come and plonk themselves down in a caravan park for a week or more, walk 100m to the beach and back again.
We did a bit of investigating about the Cape Range NP, made a few calls and realised that we weren’t going to get in tonight, so we’ve booked in at a campground at another station just outside the national park and Nick and Vin are thinking about getting up before dawn and going and queuing up outside the gates to see if we can get a spot, or else we’ll just do a day trip in. Once we had that sorted we could relax a bit more and hit the beach for a snorkel, which was great. It was different to yesterday in that the water was quite a bit deeper and the visibility not quite as good, but there were different fish and different coral. The biggest achievement was getting Daniel in to have a snorkel finally, he held onto a boogie board and went out a little way so he’s inching into it. There were these really big fish hanging around right on the edge of the reef (they have a fish feeding session in the afternoon) which were a bit scary for him but once Nick swam him past them he managed to see a bit of coral and a few other fish. I saw a trumpet fish and lots of parrot fish chomping away on the coral. Unfortunately quite a bit of it looks dead and bleached which is a shame, maybe further out it’s more colourful. Now we’re back in the car with the foot down trying to make it to Yardie Creek Homestead which is holding spots until 5pm for us.