Cape Leveque

We were very happy to leave Broome.

Lots of folks travelling south that we had met indicated that the Dampier Peninsula was a very beautiful place, so we had been looking forward to it for some time.  We spent close to a week on the Dampier Peninsula, the tip of which is Cape Leveque.

The first 100km north toward Cape Leveque was dirt and gravel with some corrugations and wash-a-ways.  Our first stop was a church built by some monks in the early 1900’s in Beagle Bay.  The interesting thing is that much of the altar is inlayed with mother-of-pearl which is used throughout the church as decoration, so it was a very beautiful place.

We spent two nights at Middle Lagoon, a small aboriginal community with a huge area for bush camping attached. The track in was 30km of rather slow dusty going.  One good thing about campsites at stations and communities is that there was plenty of water, all be it ground water.  As a result the shower roses were generally huge!  Overall the water has been really good. I reckon it was better than both Melbourne and Perth water!

The tides at Middle Lagoon were starting to get quite large at about 8m when we were there.  This resulted in the lagoon itself, which was about 1.5km across, being dry at low tide and about 6m deep at high tide.  That’s 6m of beautiful, clear, blue water; a magical sight.  No doubt it was full of fish at high tide, but as per normal none jumped on our line. 

Our first activity was to go mud crabbing and fishing at a small river mouth at the far side of the lagoon.

The first 800m along the beach was fine, but then we got well and truly bogged, right down to the axles.  Everyone got into the spirit by digging out the bogged wheels and finding vegetation to give the wheels some traction.  Foot by foot, metre by metre we edged or way off the beach and onto harder sand.  There was a little bit of time pressure as the tide was coming in!  When we finally got onto the harder sand the waves were running up the beach just a couple of metres from the wheels!  Ring any bells Chloe?

True to form, we didn’t catch any mud crabs but Jodi did land some unusual fish when fishing in the mangroves.  Alas, they were all too small to eat.  We spoke to some aborigines that were prowling around with spears.  They said that the tides were too high for mud crabs, and showed us the track to take to get out.

Sunsets are beautiful up here…

…and it is never too late to play on the beach.

This was our campsite at Middle Lagoon…

We farewelled Middle Lagoon and took to the northbound bitumen road to One Arm Point.  Here we refuelled and checked out a hatchery.  We saw cod and barru of all sizes, but it turns out they were breading trochus shells.  They release them back into the wild so the local aborigines can harvest them once they reach a particular size.  They eat the animal and sell the shells to Asia.

Just down the road from One Arm Point is the Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm.  No pearling as such occurs at this time of the year, but we did see where the pearl farms were (on the horizon over our shoulders).

Next stop was Cape Leveque.  We stayed several nights and did heaps of swimming, beach walks, saw some beautiful sunsets and listened to ABC radio broadcast the Geelong (thump) Collingwood Grand Final.

That wrapped up our time on the Dampier Peninsula.  We could see a short cut on our maps which would cut off a hundred kilometres on our way to Derby.  Most locals said it was OK so we risked it.  A lot of it was overgrown and a little sandy and boggy, but we were glad we took it.

Derby and the Gibb River Road, here we come…