Day 119: Coffin Bay to Port Lincoln

 This is by far the shortest drive of our trip, only about 50 km to Port Lincoln, which means we will arrive early and possibly have to fill in a bit of time before we can check in to the caravan park.

However, we have an important mission before leaving Coffin Bay. We need to replenish our supply of oysters. Once we leave the caravan park we drive out to the industrial area where we discovered West Coast Oysters yesterday, hoping they were open for retail sales. There was no problem, and we left with 25 oysters for $25. Not bad when you pay about $4 - $5 an oyster in a restaurant.

Having placed them in the fridge, we then headed off to Port Lincoln. We were astounded at the number of large oyster processing operations in this estate, although no others appeared to offer retail sales. All oysters are sold unshucked.

Port Lincoln is known as Australia's seafood capital, hosting the largest commercial fishing fleet in the Southern Hemisphere. It is mostly famous for Bluefin Tuna, Yellow Tail Kingfish, King George Whiting and of course, the nearby Coffin Bay Oysters.

Not surprisingly we arrive in Port Lincoln at 10 am, well ahead of the 11 am entry time for the caravan park. We decide to drive to the marina / port where there is excellent recreational boating facilities, and also the fishing fleet. We have been here before and know we can find somewhere tom park, and get a cup of coffee at the hotel on the water there.

An added bonus was that one of the fishing boats was unloading their catch of  Yellow Tail Kingfish, and it was a huge catch.

The fish were lifted out of the hold in bags by crane, and emptied into bins which were quickly loaded onto trucks ready to go to their customers. I got talking to one of the guys supervising the unloading and he told me each bag contained 90 fish weighing around 5 kg each.

Bag of fish about to be emptied into a bin

He even took one fish out of the bin to show me so I could photograph it.

As well as getting the low down on the fish catch, he also gave us a couple of recommendations of places we should visit to see the best of their seafood.

We arrived early but were still let in without much fuss at the caravan park.  Navigation to our site was a bit confused, but we got there, set up in a drive through site in a park that is not very busy at the moment, but has a lot of capacity. Within 30 minutes we were all set up.

We had lunch in town and the importance of fishing to this city is everywhere, including this statue on the waterfront of a tuna pole fisherman.

Port Lincoln Jetty

After lunch we took up one of the recommendations from the fisherman this morning, and sought out the Port Lincoln Smokehouse. It was not straightforward to find it as it seems to have changed address, but we had seen a sign as we were driving into town. It turned out to be located at a place called Duck Ponds on the road into town.

What an excellent find, we tasted a smoked tuna dip, their special made on site. It is probably the best seafood dip I have ever had. We bought the last tub they had, a new batch is being made tomorrow. We also bought some hot smoked kingfish, cold smoked salmon and pickled smoked scallops (not sure what they will taste like, but curiosity got the better of me).

Also recommended was Myers Seafood as an outlet to buy local seafood. We realised we had been there last time we were here and they had a great range of frozen seafood. Our freezer is also filling up so we refrained from buying any more, just yet.

This afternoon we had a bit of a look around this very large caravan park, which located right on the seafront. The blue dot on the map below is our location.

There is a small jetty from the caravan park where a keen fisherman was trying to catch a few garfish in less than ideal conditions. Not doing well !

Our Jetty at the caravan park

Looking along the beach  from the jetty there is another large facility

There is a coastal walk called the Parnkalla Trail, 35 km in total, which passes the beach at the caravan park. We decide to follow the trail down to the jetty that we can see at the end of the beach in the photo above to see what is at the next jetty.

It turned out to be a very serious slipway for the fishing vessels. One was up on the slip getting the bottom cleaned and the size and robustness of these vessels is pretty clear when you see them out of the water.

The holding wharf out from the slipway

This vessel was getting a bottom clean.

You can see from the design of these ships they are built for rough conditions and plenty of storage for their catch. All of the draft is in the bow and midships, with a shallow working platform at the stern.

Enough for one day, we retreat back along the trail to our van where it is warm and cosy.