Port Gibbon beach
We are back on the ocean tonight. It has been a while as we last were on the ocean in Nambucca Heads on December 13. It was cooler in Port Augusta last night compared to up north in the Flinders Ranges, but quite windy. When we left this morning the sky was very slightly overcast, but that cleared by noon. I had hoped to be able to see the solar power station at Wyalla, but it doesn’t seem to be open to the public. The only road I saw was blocked with a locked gate. However we did drive to the largest wind turbine farm in South Australia, 35 towers on top of “Mount” Millar (mount is hyperbole, as it’s really just a high ridge). They are quite large and can generate up to 75 MW of electricity which is about half of what is generated in Saskatchewan.
From there we drove a bit more south to this free campsite at the hamlet of Port Gibbon. It is in about 7 km in from the main highway. There are a few houses here and about 10 campers set up in the campsite which is right beside the ocean. We walked down to the beach and a couple of kilometres north when we got here. Much of the beach is liittered with thick layers of dried gassy material (it must be seaweed), 30 cm or more deep. I discovered about half way along our walk that I’d forgotten to put the memory card back into my camera when I took the pictures off last night, so I’d been photographing all day into nothing. I did get some nice pictures of the beach here though after reloading the memory card. There are long red cliffs of conglomerate rock in both directions north and south on the beach. Birds nest in the holes in the rock, and we saw many rosey gallahs and a couple of falcons (brown falcons I think). After we walked back to our campsite I went the other direction with the video camera and shot some pictures of the birds. However a very noisy motorbike came by as I was doing so, frightened all the birds away, and they didn’t come back.