![South map]()
South map
We decided it was time to leave Neville, Katrina and Sue's house today and to set up at a caravan park, nearer to the water, with the aim of windsurfing for a few days. Neville and Katrina weren't too sure what they were doing for New Year's Eve but we said they should contact us if they were able to get tickets to a concert or live band. We had heard of an open-air concert in
Fremantle that would have been suitable but Neville and Katrina didn't seem too keen as it would be difficult for them to get back
home. It had been recommended to us that we stay at the Woodman Point Caravan Park on Coogee Beach where we could windsurf from the park. But first, we had to find David's Xmas present from Santa.
A phonecall to my friend Ian, who owns Sails and Windsurfing Centre in O'Connor revealed that he had found a suitable board for David but it was in SOS (another windsurfing
shop) that burned down over the weekend. It seemed unreal but the story was on the news. We hadn't paid for the board so we were not at a loss, thankfully.
We spent the next four hours at Broadway, negotiating the purchase of a brand new Bombora 295 board and other necessary bits of equipment to put it all together. I've allowed him to share my 2 sails so between us we now have 4 sails ranging from 4.0m - 6.0m. Our next stop was to collect our mail from the
Perth GPO which included a parcel of warm clothes requested from
home and my repaired camera strobe. Finally, we were ready to settle in at the caravan park by about 4pm. We were really disappointed to be turned away due to a "no vacancy". This was the very first time we'd had this happen to us so we had no choice but to drive further south, out of the
Perth area.
Some of the people we'd met in
Cervantes had spoken about a good sailing place called Safety Bay and after a few phone calls I found a caravan park in nearby Rockingham that could accommodate us. Being concerned about the holiday period we booked-in for a week. We were now too far south of Neville and Katrina's place for New Year's Eve but we hadn't heard from them anyway.
After we had set up the tent and unpacked our things we went for a drive around the area and to our great delight found at least 50 people windsurfing from a number of different locations (Shoalhaven and Safety Bay). We got talking to some of the locals and met old Ted who told us we needed a "weed fin" to sail here because of the shocking seaweed in the water. A weed fin is a long racked-back fin that doesn't allow the seaweed to clump up under it. We said to one another that we'd try sailing first with our existing fins and see how bad it really was before spending any MORE money.
On our way back to the camping ground we picked up some basic food supplies for cooking a chicken satay for dinner.