Tuesday 6th September – Day 45 Today was going to be a bit of a fishing day. The women wanted to do some washing, so we were happy to get out of their way. We put the boat in and we went over the middle wall in search of anything really.
We were there for about 4 hours, and only ended up with a bream and a large whiting. It was a bit disappointing. We decided we would try the rock wall later on in the afternoon. We came back empty handed – again a disappointing event.
Wednesday 7th September – Day 46 Not a big day today. We went for a drive in Maclean for coffee, a bit of window shopping, and real shopping, and left there in time to go into Yamba for lunch at the Potbelly Pie shop. After that we went for a walk out to the end of the break wall.
We saw lots of water dragons so we took some photos. We saw one whale out wide, and some dolphins in the river. Coming home again, we had some afternoon tea in the caravan. This included the vanilla slices we bought while in town.
Thursday 8th September – Day 47 Another brilliant sunrise and cloudless morning. Went down to the rocks this morning to get some cabbage weed from between low and high tide to be used for black fishing this afternoon. Of course Mark was the bunny that got down on the rock ledge while I stood up high and watched for waves. I get all the responsible jobs. Mark got a bit wet.
After breakfast we got in the boat ready for a big day on the water. We started out on the northern side of the middle wall looking for bream, or anything else. We only had a small amount of bait left over from Tuesday, so we needed to catch something. We fished for quite a while with little bites, but nothing else really.
We tried a few places on the island that joins to the middle wall. From there we went up to Oyster Creek, which is where the high road bridge goes over the water. We spent about 3 hours there and only got 2 large flathead. Back to camp again to clean the fish and then get ready for the black fishing. We rigged up and went out to the rock wall. Not long after we got there Mark had one on but after a few minutes of fighting, he ducked under the rock and broke off. I had a similar fight and lost mine too. Mark ran back to the car to get the net and when he got back I had landed one. We tried for a while until it got dark but we didn’t get any more. We will try again tomorrow morning.
We did see 3 dolphins swimming within 3m of us and then we saw them herd a bunch of fish into a small rock structure and then tear through them as they gorged on the fish. The rock area was only about 1m deep so the dolphins were jumping in and out of the water as they ate. It was amazing to see. At least we had enough fish from today for a meal, so we went home and cooked the flathead and blackfish for dinner.
Friday 9th September – Day 48 Well it has finally happened. It is raining! The very last day in camp and it started raining about 10:30 and hasn’t stopped. It is the first rain during the day since we left Sydney 7 weeks ago. Good thing Mark and I went fishing at about 6:30 for some black fish. We got three good ones before we had to give in to the cold and overcast morning, not to mention our grumbling stomachs.
Good for us the coffee shop was serving bacon and egg rolls! We finished them off and then went to the ramp next door to the campsite to clean the fish. You can see from the photos that we were very popular with the locals. I am not looking forward to putting the boat back on the car this afternoon in the rain.