Day to Day at Venus Bay

Those of you whom have been following this blog will know that we have done a lap of the Eyre Peninsula and are now back at Venus Bay, a place that we grew very attached to when we visited back in January. The plan was to try and get away from the cold, onshore winds that have been prevailing over the East coast of the Peninsula for weeks now and at least have them at our back on the other side. Well, that part has worked and we are certainly a lot more comfortable, but, Geez, it would be bloody nice to have a day where the temperature got to 30 degrees Celsius.

The wind has even grounded the birds. These two like it on top
of the air conditioner of our caravan.

We hired a dinghy one day, when the wind was forecast to be no stronger than 8 knots. The wind forecast was correct, the rain forecast was not. We had only been on the water for 15 minutes and the heavens opened up. Sue really feels the cold, so I took her back to shore, farted around with my fishing tackle for an hour, hoping that the rain would stop, and then went out in it anyway. I don't feel the cold as much as she does.

I got a couple of nice King George Whiting and happened upon a school of really big squid. Seriously, these squid a so big that you can't just winch them in, you have to play them like a fish to avoid stripping the gears of the reel. I got four large ones, then a smallish one that I was going to let go until it squirted ink all over me and I got the shits on with it and decided to keep it, then I caught two more before they wised up and wouldn't follow the jig any more. They were in the water, just staring at me, hundreds of them! I probably could have changed from my blue jig to my orange jig and fooled them for a while, but six monstrous squid were enough!

In the meantime I have been working on a little project that I started almost a year and a half ago - fit an electric motor to the kayak. It was ready for sea-trials yesterday and I was pretty happy with the way it went. I only made two small changes to the setup and I will be able to use it in anger from now on. The electric motor was the result of me getting exhausted one day at Cossack. I had paddled upstream in the Harding River until I reached the limits of the tidal influence - I'd guess about four or five kilometres - and had planned to fish until the tide turned and paddle back on the outgoing tide, getting back to Cossack about 5:00PM.

The 'Yak with the electric motor fitted

Because the motor is so far behind me, I had to invent a way
of steering it from my seating position. Voila! Remote control!
The two green "wires" are actually whipper snipper line and
they steer the kayak using a motor in the grey box to the left.
You can also see the echo sounder transducer under the hull
at the rear.

The remote control sits behind the seat when not in use
and swings around next to me when needed.

The joystick controls steering as well as forward and reverse of the motor.
A throttle control will be fitted later. The original module failed (with smoke!)

This was a good plan, until I found that the tide upstream is delayed by about two hours from the tide at Cossack. By then, the wind had blown in really strongly and I had to paddle against it and the tide. I got back to Cossack absolutely knackered and right on dusk. You do not want to be sitting on that river in a kayak at night! (Beasties). Hence, an electric motor was ordered the very next day.

Sue has taken a drive to Streaky Bay this afternoon, to get some essential woman's primping and pampering at the local Salon. Streaky is about a half hour drive from here and the road (Flinders Highway) is excellent. She is also on a mission to buy some dowel and a fibreglass repair kit after my kayak battery fell off a table (tipped the table under its weight) and landed on the stub of one of my $400.00 baitcaster rods, breaking it off. Bugger! I could have used that rod today as the pilchard boat was in and there were Trevally everywhere. I took my lighter rod down and got eight larger fish (than the average being caught) which we will try in a seafood chowder that I'm going to knock up tonight. Trevally, squid and prawns will be the basis of the meal. I could have done better with the rod that broke, as the lighter rod made it difficult to stop the Trevally before they wrapped me around the jetty pylons. I lost four or five like that.

The forecast is for more of the same weather for a few more days (with even stronger winds on Sunday) but by next Tuesday it should start to warm up, with 34 degrees expected on Thursday (the day we are moving on.) We haven't even figured out where to go next but the choices are: Smoky Bay to top up  the water tanks and then to Baird Bay; Smoky Bay itself; Ceduna for a couple of days so that we can prepare meals to get us across the Nullarbor; Denial Bay (west of Ceduna) and do the same thing. We have also talked about ending the SA experience and head back to WA via Esperance and the south Coast of WA and stop in on a long-lost mate at Dunsborough and Sue's Folks at Busselton, before heading to Perth where I will catch up with my Folks and Sue will fly out to Phuket with a girlfriend of hers. We still have 31 days to go before we have to be at work.