We are on holiday!

Friday 26th August 2022

We were up early this morning (by our standards), to check out the ‘dolphin experience’, for which they recommend you arrive at 7:45. Of course being wild creatures the experience may or may not happen then – last night another camper said they had to wait until 11 yesterday for the dolphins to come! It used to be that anyone could go to the beach and feed the dolphins, until they realised that this interference meant that mothers were completely neglecting their young, and the calves were experiencing a 90% mortality rate! So now they will only feed the dolphins 300g of fish, and they won’t feed the same dolphin more than once that day, and not two days in a row.

The dolphin experience for us was standing on the beach, listening to someone talk about dolphins for a while, then you could stand ankle deep to get a closer look – this morning there were four dolphins swimming about. Then you had to get back onto the beach while the dolphin feeders went in, and gave two dolphins three fish each. If different dolphins come in during the morning they will repeat the process, until midday, when they stop. A section of beach is zoned for the dolphins, with no swimming or fishing allowed there so the dolphins can hunt and bring their young in. Though the dolphins cruise along the beach, and would approach other lucky swimmers outside this zone. ☺️

We only went to the first dolphin viewing – there were two more after that but the kids were happy to move on. We looked for cockles on the beach – a family last night were having some for dinner and said they had picked them up at low tide, though the tide wasn’t that low and we couldn’t find any. We headed back for a snack, did a short playground session then took the kids fishing off the beach. They both caught whiting, which was so exciting! They also got lots of bites in between which kept Bonnie going for ages! They finally took a break and Richie and I had a turn with the kids rods! I have barely fished at all the last seven years, it was pretty nice to have a turn again! Though all I caught was a 10cm whiting – I’ve lost my touch! 😆 We headed back and cooked the fish for lunch – Bonnie especially loves eating fish and gets very excited about someone catching them!

We felt pretty tired by then and went to the cafe for a coffee and just sat a while! Though at four we realised we had to jump into the amazing looking water before the day was too cold! The water was actually quite cold, so no one lasted very long. Instead we went back past the jetty to try for cockles again. This time we had success – the tide was much lower so we could walk out onto the flats and just pick them up! The oyster catchers were having a feast! Nothing like our previous cockling trips, where you do a wriggle dance in the sand between waves and find them with your feet. Here they really are just lying on the surface, waiting to be eaten! We filled up a hummus bucket and both of Richie’s crocs, then sat to have a wine on the beach while the sun set, watching the dolphins swim back and forth.

We split the cockles up into dinner (large) and bait (small). In the kitchen we cooked them up with butter, garlic and white wine and had them as an entree. Some of them were pretty gritty – no surprise given we hadn’t left them to purge at all, but they were mostly great, and tasted good (even the crunchy ones!). Bonnie wasn’t that keen on them, though she loved collecting them and was so excited to eat them! Otis loved the collecting and eating – he declared himself a big fan! We then cooked dinner – steak and an absolutely enormous broccoli from Carnarvon that had to be eaten to get it out of the fridge! The kids watched the original Charlie and the chocolate factory on the tv while they waited – another benefit of the camp kitchen! Dinner was quite late and the kids were exhausted and went straight to bed.