Day 59: Yardie Creek Gorge

 Today we have booked a boast cruise of Yardie Creek Gorge, which is 89 km from Exmouth and about as far away as you can go to a tourist attraction on North West Cape. We covered part of this coastline yesterday.

It is a much cooler day today with a lot of cloud cover and a bit of a chill in the morning breeze.


Our cruise is booked for 11am, and goes for around an hour. It takes us a good 1.5 hours to get there and as we arrived early, we did one of the short bush walks there along their Nature Trail. It was fairly easy going and a well formed trail along the edge of the gorge about 1.2 km return in length. There was plenty to see.


We can see the tour boat sitting on a mooring in the middle of the creek, so know we are in the right place


The walk is well signposted with good information boards which helped us identify the plants below.



Bush tomato



Bush potato

We get some early glimpses of the gorge.









Annual Yellowtop or Fleshy Groundsel (Senecio gregorii)


There are mangroves full of flying foxes, no mango trees around here.

We also see the rare Black footed rock wallaby.


It is getting close to departure time for the cruise, so we go back to the jetty and await further instructions. At this stage there are only about 6 of us at the jetty on time. 


The boat is ready for loading

The crowd dribbles in, one walk in pays cash, obviously there was a space available and 4 young foreigners arrive fashionably late whilst the loaded boat awaits their presence.

With the usual respect for the traditional owners, but not a welcome to country, we cast off and commence our cruise. The geography down here is very different from the coast scenery we encountered on the way down here, as the Cape Range comes closer to the coast at this point. There are also natural springs that feed fresh water into this predominantly salt water system.

There are 2 different types of mangroves in the creek, red mangroves with intense vertical root systems into the creek structure.



These root systems provide great habitat for sea life like crabs and Mangrove Jack.

Grey mangroves are more like we are used to, with the trunk of the mangrove on the sea floor and the roots coming back up vertical into fresh air.



And both exist in the same space

The cruise slowly took us up the creek and into the gorge pointing out many of the highlights of this area, in addition to the obvious geological marvel of the gorge. There were giant nests that the resident Osprey
have built. We saw many rare black footed wallabies, egrets are also quite common, and corellas nest in the crevices in the rock walls.





 


The rock wallabies blend in well to the environment




Osprey Nest

A few other views of the gorge below.



The tour headed back to the jetty after a very thorough coverage of the creek and it's significance, and no shortage of wildlife.

Fortunately, this is one of the few places that has a picnic area, so once we disembarked and had a comfort break, we wandered down to the picnic area to have the lunch we had bought along.


We were not alone, a few of the other cruise participants came down here to have lunch, and a lot of Corellas in the trees were hoping they could also participate.
 
There is 4WD beach access just past the picnic area, so after lunch we had a walk down to see what was there. We saw one 4WD almost get bogged towing his jet ski down to the beach and a few others who has launched tinnies from the beach.





It was time to head back to Exmouth. Weather conditions are not great for snorkelling, so we decide we will have a look on the way home, but there is a low level of interest given the cool temperature. Fortunately WA school holidays are over, so at least the places will  not be as crowded.

We did call in to one beach which was promoted as a good fishing spot for reef fish from the shore. There was a good rock shelf to fish from but I had no bait and the tide was wrong, and no one else was fishing, so we continued on.


Further along the road we were curious to call in and see the boat ramp where most of the diving, whale shark tours, and fishing charters leave from. It is a sizeable boat ramp with lots of parking for boat trailers and moorings for larger boats offshore. There seemed to be a bit of a shuttle service out to the moored boats, that in themselves were not that large. 





Enough looking around today, we head back to the caravan park, via the shopping centre. It is around 3.30 pm when we get back after covering a lot of km.

We cooked our bream caught yesterday for dinner, steamed Chinese Style. Delicious !

Tomorrow's plan is still evolving.






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