The beach at 42 mile crossing
It was a very hot morning. After showering in the none-too-clean showers at the Gemini Downs campsite, we drove to 42 mile crossing. This is a rough dirt road about 3 km in from the highway. At this point a four wheel drive track and a walking trail start to the beach. We took the walking trail on the way in, and I carried the video camera and tripod, as well as a backpack with our swimsuits and towels. It was heavy walking as the trail was quite a lot of soft sand, and it also wasn’t very wide so the coarse grass scratched our legs.
When we got to the ocean we decided there was no way we were going swimming. The surf wasn’t particularly high, but it was strong and the waves were coming in at a high frequency. There was a lot of sand churned up by the waves. The beach also has a large number of tiny snail shells littering it. They are embedded in the sand and where the dunes have broken down the snail shells are exposed.
I climbed back up on the dunes and video taped the surf. As I was about to leave I turned back inland and saw a large two metre long snake slithering up the dune. I filmed it as it went up to the top of the sand and then crossed over to the other side of the dune.
We walked back along the four wheel drive track to the beach. At first it was easier walking, but it soon became very soft sand so, while it was wide compared to the walking trail so no scratchy grass, it was very hard walking in the heat of the morning. It must have been close to 40 degrees C by the time we finished. It had been cooler near the water with the breeze off the ocean, but it was quite hot as we ate our lunch.
We drove to the small town of Robe, and got here in early afternoon. The Big 4 campground is nice and is right across the road from a park that leads to the beach. It wouldn’t be more than 100 metres to the sand of the beach. However, it is another 100 metres out to the water, and then a fifty metre walk into the water before it gets deep enough to swim. The water was also quite cool, and so it felt good. By now there was a large cloud system moving in, and it started to sprinkle rain. With the change in weather it became a lot cooler. We went back to our motorhome and read outside for a while. Though it occasionally spit rain it never rained hard enough to get the books wet. When it stopped raining we went back to the beach, swam again, then walked a couple of kilmetres north east along the beach. There were a lot of vehicles parked on the sand of the beach, and many families in the water, some on kayaks or canoes, and some paddling surfboards.