We finally left the Cape Range National Park and spent a night partly sheltered in a sand dune from the raging wind. We had found a boat ramp on the way in and decided to free camp there on the way out. Now, boat ramps in WA are expansive affairs. Easily a couple of acres of parking space. I can only imagine what this fishing mall would look like in peak season. They’d give Bunnings car parks a run for their money.
The next morning , we’d all but packed and I went to hit the slide-out ‘In” button. Luckily Tamika had her eyes on the bed base and called an alarming “Stop!”. The near side bed base was moving across the floor. The slide-out when out quickly. Mmmmm..re-tried, same result. Something was NQR. After a brief inspection it was clear that for some reason the RH slide groove was catching the bed base rail on the way in. In,out, repeat was not going to solve this. We spent the best part of an hour checking that the twin motors were working in unison, but apart from that, our options were limited, In the end we decided that dismantling that part of the bed base was our only temporary option to get us back to town. With my fix-all screwdriver, had it down in a few minutes and we were off!
Clearly a work around was required. The only easy one was to reduce the height of the rail, take it out of the equation. Exmouth is a small place, but every town has a handyman and we found ours. Max planed 20mm off the top and did other adjustments I hadn’t thought of. Problem solved. Still don’t know why this happened but clearly a bit of slippage somewhere in the mechanics.
The wind had eased and the further we we went inland the easier it became. It was only a short hop to Coral Bay and again we tucked ourselves away in a large boat ramp car park. Ningaloo Reef is literally on the beach at Coral Bay. From our vantage point, we could see heaps of places to dive in for a look, but again that bloody wind whipped us back inside the van for the rest of the day. And it got worse as the night wore on, rockin’ and rollin’, fearing the solar panels would suddenly fly skywards a la Castaway. About 11pm, I said “Right, we’re out of here.” As we headed back towards town, Tamika spotted a flat area in the lee of a hill and we slept a lot safer for the rest of the night.
Coral Bay is less of a seaside village, more a giant caravan park, that runs the length of the only street. Still, it’s a postcard, with beautiful white sands, crystal clear water, the reef a spit away and best of all protected from the prevailing winds. We should have stayed longer, but parking was an issue, so we settled for a quick dip that shook the cobwebs of last night out of our heads. A quick check of the weather showed strong winds for the next seven days. There’d be no fun snorkeling for the next week, so we decided to head straight down to Carnarvon, re-arrange our schedule and head out east (sounds funny, don’t it) to the Kennedy Ranges for a few days.
It was a three hour run to Carnarvon, so we stopped for lunch at Manilya, a one roadhouse outlier on the highway. WA has probably the most comprehensive rest area program in Australia and this one was one of the nicest so far.
We arrived at Carnarvon in the late afternoon. Another boat ramp, another free camp. We were pulled up by a local fisherman and warned that the local Ranger was “….a real bastard”, but said Ranger was unsighted. Two days later we headed out to Gascoyne Junction.
