Day 98 – 21st April 2018 – Giralia Station

There is another lovely man called John who has stayed at Giralia for 5 months previously and done the bush camp host role and he and his wife have come to stay. John is happy to clean the amenities, so Col and I have been asking Denver for some additional tasks (other than fishing) so we can pay our way. Denver assures us that there is plenty of work to be done but to make the most of the good weather and quiet time at the camp. So he again suggested that Col and I take the boat out fishing today.

We let Denver know that we have a Drone and the GoPro and Denver is keen to get some footage of the station and we are very happy to do this for him.

Denver gave us a map of the area and showed us where we can catch mud crabs and also where we can use a fishing net to catch prawns. Fishing is so different in WA, you need a license to fish and another license to use a net! Col is new to the net so this is a new skill to develop. We went down to the mud flats to look for crabs. We found lots of small ones, we saw a big turtle and a small octopus and also a small shark. The place was popping with life and I could have spent hours there exploring but Col was keen to get the boat into the water.

We are able to leave the boat down by the water which is great as it saves us towing the boat backwards and forwards along the 35km rough road. We got to see the beautiful white barn owl again and managed to capture some video footage of it.

The boat launch and retrieval both went smoothly again and we did a fair bit of driving around to check out the spots that Denver had given us on the map. On the way to our prawn fishing spot we noticed fish jumping out the water and birds dive bombing into the water to try and catch them. So we turned around to chase the school of fish and try trawling some lures through them. It took us a bit too long to put the lures on and get out there as they had really dispersed by then. So we didn’t work out what sort of fish they were. We saw a really big sting ray jump about 4 feet out of the water and make an almighty splash dropping back in. There were many dolphins around and fish jumping out of the water.

We made it to where we thought the prawn spot was and Col did a few attempts throwing the net. Denver lent us a smaller net that he uses as Col’s net is quite big. Unfortunately we didn’t catch any. We will read up and watch some videos on catching prawns as I would like to get better at this skill!!!!!

There was a spectacular sunset and we enjoyed watching the sun go down over the station.