22^nd August: Denham

Rain has gone - just a distant memory. Clear skies and gentle breeze which becomes stronger at night. We are a bit exposed in our little corner and Glen has had to put the deflappers on the annexes.

Today, we visited the places we had driven past on the way in, Goulet and Eagle Bluffs, Shell Beach and Nanga Bay. The two bluffs gave a great view of the Henri Frechinet Bay and we could see how extensive the seagrass meadows are. One of the largest areas in the world, theses banks are the main reason Shark Bay (of which Henri Freycinet Bay is part) has World Heritage status. This is the home base of a large number of dugong colonies and dugongs are a threatened species. These and the Moreton Bay Dugongs are the last big colonies left in the world and so are highly protected as are their seagrass habitats. In the photographs, they are the dark areas and they tend to grow seaward, leaving bare sand behind. Here all sorts of fish, sharks and turtles also breed and feed in the seagrass.(Seagrass is not seaweed; it is an underwater grass which tolerates the highly saline environment. In fact, they contribute to it by trapping sand and allowing water to flow into places like Hamelin Pool but not out. It is a very interesting place!)

The dark patches are seagrass.

Goulet Bluff has a board walk (made of recycled plastic) high above the water and the clear sandy waters before the sea grass can be clearly viewed, I saw a turtle and we saw a pair of young sharks swimming about in the shallows. It was too high to see fish! The water is so clear! As I explained to one man who was musing about it, it is because there are virtually no rivers emptying silt into the coastal waters and what rivers there are, flood only infrequently.

We left the chilly wind and turned eastward into Shell Beach. This is where billions of cockle shells have piled up over millions of years. The animal that inhabits the shell, flagum erugatum, loves the highly saline waters. (It has a symbiotic relationship with a bacteria that lives in its shell and neutralises the salt!) There are no predators and so they are profuse! Again, there is shell block mining. The beach is nearly 200 metres wide and the shells have beeen pushed up into dunes about a metre high by very strong storm waves. The water is weedy and, of course, very salty. Not a tree to be seen, just low scrubby mulga and acacias that cast no shade and that one could not sit under. There was no where to sit and have lunch and so we moved on.

 The shell dunes:

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 This is St Andrew by the Sea Anglican Church made with shell blocks over 100 years ago.

A close up of the blocks.  The inside smelt very musty!

The last stop was Nanga Station on Nanga Bay. It was a sheep station but now is a resort. Sealed road wound out to it and so there were vans there. But to get to the bay, we had to drive right through the resort and stop on the hard packed shelly beach where there were acouple of shelters aand tables. There was a boat ramp of sorts; we saw one van back up and brake qquickly so that the boat flew off the trailer backwards into the water – not a safe way to launch a boat!!

We came home, buying a pack of whiting from the Fish Factory. So wehad crumbed whiting for dinner. (I dropped a piece on the ground, hard backed shells, and itwas a bit gritty!) Gail went fishing off the jetty, catching only small ones and throwing them back while we went for a walk. There is an old boat down there called the “Galli Curchi” who was an Italian soprana who visited in the 1920's. Mum used to have records of her and we all gre up listening to her. The boat is an odd shape: very long, extendd deck used for dredging first and then fishing. It is about 100 years old!