Walpole

Friday we left Molloy CP and moved on to Walpole. It was a bit sad waving goodbye to the last few guests and staff as we left as we had so much fun in the park and on the river. It’s a beautiful drive to here though so we enjoyed that. We took a detour down a dirt road for 7ks to buy a smoked trout and some veggies from a roadside stall outside Pemberton. The few corrugations caused a jar of olives to tip over and black olive juice to spill all over the bottom of the fridge-the fridge I not long cleaned of mould! We got some nice organic veggies, herbs and apples for our trouble though.

We’ve driven through Walpole once about 4 years ago but never really got off the road to have a good look-the place is beautiful! I also think we were tired and arguing at the time about where we would stay and decided to push onto the bigger town of Manjimup. The park we had been recommended to book into is especially nice-it’s just like a big bush park with heaps of native plants and big private well spaced sites. The ablutions blocks are spotless and there is 3 of them. The park sits up fairly high above the inlet so the views over the inlet are pretty special. Our original plan was to stay 3 nights and move on to Denmark and Albany but it didn’t take much to convince us to stay a further 3 nights. We’ll bypass Denmark and just head straight to Albany for a bit of shopping before we go on to Bremmer Bay for Easter.

Saturday we took the boat off and went fishing. Launching the boat, we got the car bogged to the axles on the beach (in front of every yacht club member in town) and had to have one of the guys bring us a pressure gauge so we could let the tires down and get it out! Not a very good start to our fishing. We had headed out pretty late mostly for a look around, but took our rods along “just in case”. I caught a trevally the moment I put my rod in the water (and ended up catching 3 more around a kilo each). We caught 10 King George whiting legal size (threw the 3 smaller of them back rather than fillet them) 1 35cm bream and a couple of tommy ruff. We released 2 of the trevally and kept the other 2 for bait!

Yesterday we headed out again and caught ourselves 2 bream, 3 whiting and two tommy ruff. Russ asked was measuring one of my whiting and asking (again) what the legal size was. I told him 28cm and he said that was a bit sad as he’d thrown my 29 ½ cm fish back. That’s still a bit small to be bothered filleting!!! We found a secret spot on the other side of the inlet. If we line up a large farm hedge over the centre of the yacht club rooms, then three large stingrays start circling the boat, we are there. We have tried in other spots but haven’t caught a thing!

After fishing and cleaning the fish, we went for a drive to a lookout over the inlets and town then on to the Giant Tingle Tree and Circular Pool. We were the only people out there and the drive through the forest of giant karri and tingles was beautiful. The walk out to the Tingle Tree was beautiful with plants and birds. Tingles are a species of eucalypt that only grow in this corner of WA. They are enormous and early photos of the Giant show cars parked inside the hollow at the base.

Last night we had beautiful fresh fish, salad and chips (bought in town) for a lovely dinner.

This morning we went out fairly early for us and caught enough fish to make ourselves a curry for dinner. We both just had our showers and are now doing a bit of laundry before heading out for a drive to Denmark.