Coffin Bay & National Park

On Thursday 25th October we set off for Coffin Bay, world famous for it's scrumptious oysters.
We arrived in the evening and, after driving around a little, decided to find somewhere to park the camper up for the night - we have become much better at looking for spots to park up whilst there's still light as we have had a few experiences waking in less than desirable or rather odd spots!
There were very few spots around town as the town is very small, mostly a few houses belonging to fishermen and the absolute essentials in life: a coffee shop (doubling up as an oyster bar?), a convenience store and a liquor shop. There is a large campsite in the middle of the bay but we usually find campsites far too conservative (reserved only for times in desperate need of showers!), so we continued toward our main point of interest, the National Park.

Coffin Bay's National Park is about 300km squared. It is situated to the west of Port Lincoln and only takes about 50mins to get there. There is an $8 entry fee and a further $8 fee per night camped. We paid our $24 into the honestly box (cheaper than one night in a campsite, pfft!) at the park entrance and set off toward the bay. We took turns longboarding along side Autumn, holding onto the open window while the other drove - great fun but rather sketchy as we had to keep an eye out for crossing roos and emu!
We parked up by some public toilets (Of the long drop variety, more info on these later) and ran down to the beach immediately. It was getting pretty dark and was a little chilly so I started with the dinner while Luke trialled his new fishing gear. About an hour later Luke returned, windswept and broken hearted: he had cast his rod and snapped it! We ate dinner and drank some wine and decided that we would return to Pt Lincoln the next day to buy a new rod, after all - we had come to Coffin Bay to fish and I was keen to try my luck in the big pond also!
On Friday we made a fly by visit to Pt Lincoln, Luke bought a new rod and serviced the van, filling it with water and fuel, etc while I tackled the important task of sourcing the G&T and sending my bro a moonpig for his 18th (Happy Birthday again Jack!!). We arrived back at the bay and went straight to the beach to practice casting. It was so nice to look in the rock pools and collect 'pretty shells'... Luke was keen to fish so I had a bit of 'me' time. It felt like forever since I was last able to slowly plod along a beach picking up shells and deciding which one was the nicest, not a care in the world but that one simple task, sounds silly but maybe this is what travelling is about after all - reminding ourselves of what it's like to play again! Unfortunately we made no catches on Friday but we did rather enjoy our G&T instead...

We caught an Australian Salmon!

On Saturday we hit the beach early. The sun was shining enough to warm the chilly breeze so we were stood about waist deep while we were casting. After a few hours we witnessed a pod of 14 or so dolphins, riding in the surf. They were so fun to watch and so close to the shore! A few fishermen joined us shortly after we saw the dolphins and we realised that the large patches of seaweed, as we had initially judged them, were actually massive shoals of Australian Salmon which the dolphins must have pushed into the bay earlier!! We cast out with a mixture of panic and excitement - I can see why they call fishing a sport - I got such an adreneline rush! Luke cuaght one which he bought in only to throw back as it was a little damaged but he got another bite only moments later. I shared some of the fight but this Salmon was big and strong and had to hand it over to Luke after a short stint for him to make the final beach. After we beached it we gutted it on site, sharing our unwanted bits with the local albatross (they are HUGE!). We washed it out and took it up to the camper where we filleted it and pan fried it for lunch, putting the remaining fillets aside for dinner. We were told by a local fisherman that he had never seen such big shoals and that we ad caught a bigun'. We were quite proud!

Preparing our lunch... and dinner!

After we ate lunch we saw what appeared to be seals around the area the Salmon had been - It all seemed to be following some natural order as minutes after the seals came, along creeped a shark slowly scavenging in the shallows just metres from where we had been standing waist-deep earlier on (Eeek!). 'Now THIS is Australia', was all we could keep saying!

At the foot of a big sand dune

We walked up the bay after (taking care not to enter after our shark witnessing) and explored the white sand dunes 5 or 6km up the bay, if you haven't sampled sand dune jumping, I recommend it. Needless to say, we slept like babies that night!
 Early the next morning we left the park and returned to Pt Lincoln where, in a moment of spontaneity (often mistaken for madness) we decided to make the 650km return journey to Adelaide. In one journey. Nutters.
We set off at 2:30pm and arrived 10 hours, one takeaway roast chicken, an expensive hot chocolate and a minor tiff later at 12:30am Monday morning, where we parked up at our familiar spot in Henley.