Coral Bay, Carnarvon & Quobba

Coral Bay

150km south of Exmouth is Coral Bay where we decided to spend our next night continuing to experience the Ningaloo Coast. The town Coral Bay is named for the bay upon which it sits and although I am in danger of becoming blasé to the natural wonders of Western Australia as we drove around the corner to arrive at our campsite for the night and saw this bay it still managed to take my breath away.

Once ‘checked in’ we put on our swimming gear, grabbed our masks and snorkels and headed down to the beach to see what we could see among the coral in this protected bay. Unfortunately this is where the balloon (that is the initial wow factor that the bay gave us) whilst not being burst perhaps experienced a slow puncture as all we saw were a few fish (boring) and some dead coral . . . maybe I am beginning to expect too much? Not to be deterred we had heard that if we were to walk around 1km along the beach there was another Bills Bay that acted as a shark nursery where young sharks (principally white and black tip reef sharks and lemon sharks) would build up their strength in a safe area before heading further out to sea. This was most definitely worthwhile and in my view the real natural wonder of this section of coast

Carnarvon

The next day it was time to head 240km south to Carnarvon best known for the key role it played in the 1969 moon landings as a communication relay station for the Gemini and Apollo space missions. On arrival it was apparent that probably for the first time since leaving Port Hedland we had arrived in a self sustaining, 365 day a year town. Whilst tourism obviously brings a welcome income to the town its whole existence doesn’t appear to depend on it, in fact Carnarvon is known throughout Western Australia as the state’s fruit basket with fruit farms all around the town producing fruit to distribute state wide. The town also has a connection with the sea having had a whaling station up until the mid 1960’s with the whale oil harvested being pumped along the towns 1 Mile Jetty to waiting ships that would then transport it to Europe.

A darker side to Carnarvon’s history relates to the fact that between 1908 and 1919 several hundred Aboriginal people from across Western Australia were forcibly removed from their families to lock hospitals on Bernier and Dorre Islands via Carnarvon. Many family members who were separated during the lock hospital scheme never saw eachother again, it is conservatively estimated that more than 200 people died on the islands. The prisoner patients were said to have the non-specific diagnosis of ‘venereal disease’ although there are many questions about the reliability of the diagnosis, needless to say non-indigenous people with veneral disease were not subjected to these measures. In 2019 a memorial was placed near the 1 Mile Jetty facing out to sea in the direction of the islands

On a happier note no visit to Carnarvon is complete without a visit to the Carnarvon Space & Technology Museum which celebrates the role it played in the Gemini and Apollo space missions. This is a really interesting site to visit run by enthusiastic and knowledgeable local people and it is still staggering even with the technology we have available to us today to think that what was achieved by the Gemini and Apollo missions is possible let alone with the level of computing power that was available in the 1960’s.

Quobba

On leaving Carnarvon we decided it was worth heading 50km North to see the Quobba Blowholes. Being a limestone coast the coastline continues to experience erosion and one effect of this is the creation of sea caves through which surging sea water erupts through a series of natural chimneys shooting skywards, geyser like, to heights of up to 30-metres. This is simply one more example of the power of nature; if I consider the size of pump that would be needed to recreate a similar affect and the energy that would be consumed by this pump then it isn’t a great leap of imagination to think that whilst we are focussing our efforts on solar and wind power generation perhaps we should be focusing more effort on tidal power generation?