It's not all beer and skittles...
(Warning: Long!)
We finally made it to South Australia – out of the clutches of WA at last! So far… well … it has been a little challenging in parts. Not South Australia’s fault – just the circumstances we’ve found ourselves in.
We stayed a night at Fowlers Bay Caravan Park, which apart from the masses of stinking sea grass so close to us that Nic had to light a sandalwood mozzie repellant stick to cope with the smell, was OK. Its main attraction at this point was a shower!
It got a whole lot better when we drove off in search of a fishing spot, and came upon a now familiar landscape of hard and rocky dunes leading to limestone cliffs and reefs. We found a fishing spot on the edge of a reef at low tide, with a thunderstorm developing out to sea. Tim cast and caught a salmon immediately. That’s better - the fishing had been pretty woeful until this point! So we left with a few fish in hand and in the fridge.
The next morning we woke to a HOWLING wind. It has been windy right along the South Coast, but this wind rattled our brains and felt likely to cause insanity if experienced for too long. We had also both woken with disgusting headaches – not hangovers, maybe something hayfever related from this foul wind. And it was HOT. So in this frame of mind we packed up camp, miraculously without breaking up or killing each other, and called into Cactus Beach. A pilgrimage of sorts for Tim, even though his shoulder is still not OK enough for him to be surfing. Perhaps not the best scenario in which to make a pilgrimage, but at least he was spared the sight of perfect waves as the swell appeared very low!
To complete this day best forgotten, 5km before Ceduna we felt Elsie shudder & shake and discovered that a wheel on the trailer had completely come off, snapping the bolts and mangling the wheel arch/mudguard in the process. Tim went back looking for the wheel and Nic was gazing about the scratchy dry paddock next to us, still slightly stunned, trying to escape the marauding flies, and noticed a wheel that had to be ours. It must have flown alongside us, for a couple of hundred metres, bouncing right over 2 barbed wire fences! The wheel nuts had obviously loosened since they were last checked (on the limestone outcrops and corrugations of the Balladonia track perhaps?) and then the wobble had sheared the bolts and the wheel off.
After calling the RAC we had a guy come out, check it out, go back into town for the bolts & a spot of welding, and then fix it for us on the side of the road. We were lucky that it happened so close to town, and not in the middle of nowhere, where Tim insists that we’d be spending a day doing our own bush mechanic job to get us to the next town.
So we kind of limped into Ceduna on Saturday afternoon, with an extra day in town while we waited for Monday. Which has been fine – good fishing to be had here, fresh oysters to buy, lots of beautiful beaches and cliffs and rocky sand dunes to explore outside of town.
Monday came and we got a few things sorted out (hammering the trailer mud guard back into place, swapping tyres around etc) and meanwhile the temperature got hotter and hotter, with a searing wind from the north-west. Some reports say it was 44 degrees - it had to be well over 40. And this was the day we spent in workshops and factories and Tim spent lying on bitumen and getting hot and greasy. Nic managing to escape into air-conditioning most of the time - the benefits of being mechanically illiterate!
At about 2 or 3 pm we finally headed out of town and by this stage it was scorching hot and the wind, if anything was stronger and hotter. 5km out of Ceduna Elsie’s temperature gauge shot right up so we pulled over immediately to find that the radiator was fine – but the gauge continued to fluctuate. So back into Ceduna for an unsuccessful afternoon with a mechanic trying to figure out whether it was the gauge, the thermostat or the sender. At 6pm, with a new thermostat in place, it was agreed it was the sender, which no-one in Ceduna had in stock, and we’d have to stay until Wednesday to get the part from Adelaide and get it fixed.
Wondering if there is some forcefield of a 5km radius that is preventing us from leaving Ceduna – perhaps there is some significant lesson that we have to learn from Ceduna?
By 6.30pm Tim had just about passed out with heat exhaustion, and it was still astonishingly hot, and the only thing we could do was buy some beers that weren’t cold enough, and take them down to the tidal flat of a beach (at low tide), where we had to lie flat in about 40cms of water to stay remotely cool. Any bit of body outside the water was instantly blown dry and hot by the still searing wind. With daylight saving it doesn’t get dark here until about 8.15/8.30pm, and it was hot until about 10pm and that wind just kept blowing. What a day! We’re amazed that the Eyre Peninsula didn’t burn to the ground.
We finally made it to South Australia – out of the clutches of WA at last! So far… well … it has been a little challenging in parts. Not South Australia’s fault – just the circumstances we’ve found ourselves in.
We stayed a night at Fowlers Bay Caravan Park, which apart from the masses of stinking sea grass so close to us that Nic had to light a sandalwood mozzie repellant stick to cope with the smell, was OK. Its main attraction at this point was a shower!
It got a whole lot better when we drove off in search of a fishing spot, and came upon a now familiar landscape of hard and rocky dunes leading to limestone cliffs and reefs. We found a fishing spot on the edge of a reef at low tide, with a thunderstorm developing out to sea. Tim cast and caught a salmon immediately. That’s better - the fishing had been pretty woeful until this point! So we left with a few fish in hand and in the fridge.
The next morning we woke to a HOWLING wind. It has been windy right along the South Coast, but this wind rattled our brains and felt likely to cause insanity if experienced for too long. We had also both woken with disgusting headaches – not hangovers, maybe something hayfever related from this foul wind. And it was HOT. So in this frame of mind we packed up camp, miraculously without breaking up or killing each other, and called into Cactus Beach. A pilgrimage of sorts for Tim, even though his shoulder is still not OK enough for him to be surfing. Perhaps not the best scenario in which to make a pilgrimage, but at least he was spared the sight of perfect waves as the swell appeared very low!
To complete this day best forgotten, 5km before Ceduna we felt Elsie shudder & shake and discovered that a wheel on the trailer had completely come off, snapping the bolts and mangling the wheel arch/mudguard in the process. Tim went back looking for the wheel and Nic was gazing about the scratchy dry paddock next to us, still slightly stunned, trying to escape the marauding flies, and noticed a wheel that had to be ours. It must have flown alongside us, for a couple of hundred metres, bouncing right over 2 barbed wire fences! The wheel nuts had obviously loosened since they were last checked (on the limestone outcrops and corrugations of the Balladonia track perhaps?) and then the wobble had sheared the bolts and the wheel off.
After calling the RAC we had a guy come out, check it out, go back into town for the bolts & a spot of welding, and then fix it for us on the side of the road. We were lucky that it happened so close to town, and not in the middle of nowhere, where Tim insists that we’d be spending a day doing our own bush mechanic job to get us to the next town.
So we kind of limped into Ceduna on Saturday afternoon, with an extra day in town while we waited for Monday. Which has been fine – good fishing to be had here, fresh oysters to buy, lots of beautiful beaches and cliffs and rocky sand dunes to explore outside of town.
Monday came and we got a few things sorted out (hammering the trailer mud guard back into place, swapping tyres around etc) and meanwhile the temperature got hotter and hotter, with a searing wind from the north-west. Some reports say it was 44 degrees - it had to be well over 40. And this was the day we spent in workshops and factories and Tim spent lying on bitumen and getting hot and greasy. Nic managing to escape into air-conditioning most of the time - the benefits of being mechanically illiterate!
At about 2 or 3 pm we finally headed out of town and by this stage it was scorching hot and the wind, if anything was stronger and hotter. 5km out of Ceduna Elsie’s temperature gauge shot right up so we pulled over immediately to find that the radiator was fine – but the gauge continued to fluctuate. So back into Ceduna for an unsuccessful afternoon with a mechanic trying to figure out whether it was the gauge, the thermostat or the sender. At 6pm, with a new thermostat in place, it was agreed it was the sender, which no-one in Ceduna had in stock, and we’d have to stay until Wednesday to get the part from Adelaide and get it fixed.
Wondering if there is some forcefield of a 5km radius that is preventing us from leaving Ceduna – perhaps there is some significant lesson that we have to learn from Ceduna?
By 6.30pm Tim had just about passed out with heat exhaustion, and it was still astonishingly hot, and the only thing we could do was buy some beers that weren’t cold enough, and take them down to the tidal flat of a beach (at low tide), where we had to lie flat in about 40cms of water to stay remotely cool. Any bit of body outside the water was instantly blown dry and hot by the still searing wind. With daylight saving it doesn’t get dark here until about 8.15/8.30pm, and it was hot until about 10pm and that wind just kept blowing. What a day! We’re amazed that the Eyre Peninsula didn’t burn to the ground.
posted by Tim and Nic at
9:06 am
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