Happy Birthday to Trucky, and Jess impresses the locals

The next day was Trucky’s birthday, and he was pleased to wake up right next to the ocean. We took Terry the turquoise Terios out for a spin up north to try to find a good fishing spot. There’s heaps of big game fish right off the cliffs, but it’s very dangerous area. All along the coastline are plaques for people who have been swept off the rocks by king waves. One fisherman – known to the guys at the campsite - lost his life only last month.

We stopped at Quobba Station to get bait. This is a remote sheep station, and I found it very strange to see sheep wandering as they pleased amongst the dunes. I was quite relieved when Trucky decided there was nowhere that he deemed suitable for fishing from, and we headed back to camp. We were lucky enough on this outing to see another whale very close to shore. This one was much more frisky than yesterday’s group, doing backflips out of the water and flicking it’s tail around.

We spent the afternoon on the beach, where Jess caught an enormous whiting. She’s not interested in fishing at all, but thought she’d have a go throwing Alex’s line into the water. She only cast a few feet into the waves, and wandered up and down in the water, singing, dancing, and dragging the rod around with her. After only a couple of minutes, she reeled back in to find a 28cm whiting - bigger than we had ever seen! The locals were very impressed, saying it was much larger than most whiting coming out of the bay. Maybe it was disinterest that brought good luck, as no one else caught anything much that night.

Trucky didn’t want to leave his fishing spot (not good for the ego to be out-fished by a ten year old girl!) so we brought dinner down to the water, eating on a blanket under the stars. It was a lovely end to another great day.