Cape Range National Park, Western Australia, AustraliaCape Range National Park.
We stopped in Exmouth and topped up our
water tanks, fuel and called into one of the 2 little IGA
supermarkets. Would you believe the this one had some vegetarian
stuff I had not seen before and they tell me the other one across
from them has a whole fridge for vegetarian things. So when we shop
again we can stock up, I bought a couple of things to try first.
We arrived in the park and found our
allotted camp host place in Mesa campground. This is a new area
mostly built last year after cyclone destroyed it. It is more
sheltered then some as it is behind the sand dunes now. The
information building is a couple of kilometres away we can just see
the building. The benefit is they have boosted the phone reception
there so we have some phone at most times in our campsite.
This site has beach boat launching as
some fishing is allowed here. We can swim and snorkel too its just a
walk over sand dunes or walk along beach driveway.
Like most beaches here there are
currants but not as bad as the drift snorkel beach of Turquoise bay,
where there are lots of coral and fish to sea.
We do find time to snorkel on our beach
and find some coral before it drops deep, so we find coral fish then
in deep schools of fish the fishermen are after, but they can not get
to these from shore nor can they bring their boats just here. Some do
try at low tide to fish here from shore but can not get past the
coral and hooks get stuck—good.
On one swim I find a couple of large
Rock lobsters that darted under some rocks. I made the mistake of
mentioning this to some of the campers trying to find out what type
they where and they all offered me money to dive down and catch them
No way. One day I found some lobster legs on the beach so someone
caught one.
We drove down to Mangrove Bay which has
a bird hide and a mudflat beach. In the shallows we found baby Lemon
sharks, baby black tipped reef sharks and lots of blue spotted rays.
We also went to Yardie creek on the
boat trip up the creek from the estuary. This we got because we were
volunteers its a very good 2 hour trip that you get to see heaps of
Black flanked rock wallabies, osprey and rays in the water. We will
kayak this when we come back in November December for the turtle
monitoring.
We also went out on the Glass bottom
boat and got to snorkel in the sanctuary. We had a very good 2 hour
trip with an hour in the water with a young skipper with good fish
and coral knowledge.
We did not get to snorkel out at Osprey
where people have been seeing turtles , but when we return we will.
We had campers here that we had met in
Lucky Bay in April and a visit from 2 Melbourne ladies we had met in
Dryandra woodland its good seeing people again. We met a couple in
this camp that are from SA . He can only walk with a walker but with
help can make it down to swim and I snorkelled with here. We have
been invited to call in on a few people if we are passing.
One day we drove into Exmouth and went to Shothole canyon for a look . It took all day so had lots to do when we got back. Called shot hole because of all the holes blasted in rock looking for oil.
This time its only a short stint in
Cape Range but we return in November to Exmouth for trainning for
turtle monitoring as well as camp hosting in the park.
2025-05-22