Point Avoid
We began our travel today by driving to Point Avoid, the southern tip of Coffin Bay National Park. It is easy to see why Matthew Flinders named it so on his voyage around Australia in 1802. It is an extremely rugged coastline with very large reefs and rocks where you can see the surf breaking a long distance out to sea. Golden Island is approximately a kilometre off shore, and there is a reef almost continuously between the shore and the island. A very strong rip current ran out from the shore towards the island, with continual rapids more than 100 metres wide just off the shore.
Point Avoid and the reef to Golden Island
The shore itself is a beautiful white sand beach stretching for kilometres in either direction from the point. In the distance are large sand dunes that have formed back of the limestone cliffs which define the shoreline itself. The cliffs are about 30 metres high and their eroded remains form many of the formidable rocks that form the point. It is not a location one would want to sail into.
We walked along the beach for quite a while, but slowly as I was taking a lot of video, and Enid isn’t feeling very well. She seems to have a head cold and her body is aching. We’re not sure where she caught it from, as we haven’t had a lot of contact with people, but it was likely in one of the grocery stores we are in, as that’s the only place we see people closeup much.
A family (grandparents, father, sons) arrived at the beach after us. When we met them they had caught three “Aussie Salmon”. Since it’s not a trout or a salmon, I’m not sure where it got its name. They are a large fish, and the biggest one they caught was about 5 kilograms. They form large schools, and they watched for them from high on the cliffs. When they spotted a school they would go down to the water and cast out into it.
After we ate lunch at the point we drove to Port Elliston. The drive is very uneventful, and the scenery is just kilometre after kilometre of rangeland. There are a couple of large salt lakes we drove by, very few sheep, and not much of anything else. We stopped here early to do the laundry, and after we’d started the wash I walked to the grocery store and bought a litre of ice cream. I ran most of the way back from the store (about 800 metres) so that the ice cream wouldn’t melt. It was a nice treat, and only the second ice cream we’ve bought here. It is warm but not hot, but very windy this afternoon, so the wash is nearly dry in the hour since we hung up the clothes.