Warroora time
Tucked up inside the reef at Sandy Point, in company with Blue Yonder and Eureka IV, as well as the many campers who are enjoying the July school holiday pilgrimage to the warmth, we soon settle into a nice routine - revolving around the waves of course!!
We have been hanging for more surf and soon tuck into the waves on offer around Warroora. Prime time with school holidays, but a little planning still allows us plenty of uncrowded waves, as well as a few sessions of crowd. It is a 5 minute dinghy ride to the inside of the break, but once you get within about 800 metres the seas are really confused with tidal current, wind chop and swell all combining. Bob took a couple over the front and we were down to a crawl to get safely to the anchor point for the surf.
After a few days of fun waves - usually about a 3 hour session we were both rediscovering our surfing mojo. Amazing what a decent wave in good conditions can do for your confidence and get you back onto form, as well as getting some strength back in those shoulders. After a few days on the single fin, Pete changed up to his Hayden Shapes board, a board he got for his 50th and has had it sitting in waiting all this time! Glassy afternoons, 4 people out….. ‘This is what we signed up for’ was the cry as we headd back to Singularity.
Drew was coming up from Carnarvon for a few days - by helicopter of course - so we had pre-booked a few items from the shops and had put the word out that a celebrity was flying in for a few days. Soon we heard the buzz of the heli as it did a lap of the bay, looking for an ideal landing spot - which turned out to be on the beach. Out stepped Drew, much to the joy of the youngsters on Blue Yonder, who got to get up close to a helicopter for the first time. Although travelling in a two seat Robinson 22, Drew still managed to fit in a block of beer plus our shopping. Most importantly he had two parcels that we had been waiting for - one being new cupboard latches for the slide out draw in the bottom nav station and our pizza stone for the BBQ.
The latches for the drawer are a classic boating life story. I broke them when I fell/got thrown down the companion way on our passage to Steep Point. I had to order them from Melbourne - which was really easy and the company we were ordering them from were great as we were replacing superseded parts. The latches were sent via TNT Express - which ironically took nearly 3 weeks!! After Drew gave them to me, I had the drawer fixed in about 3 minutes - just took about a month for the whole thing to be sorted!
The other highlight was the pizza stone. After having a few pizza nights on Blue Yonder and watching Julia cook her sour dough in the BBQ, we googled and found a rectangle pizza stone and ordered online. Delivered to Carnarvon and flown in by helicopter - it fitted the BBQ perfectly! Naturally, we had a pizza night to celebrate and they were good!!
The next week was more surfing, socializing on the beach and generally hanging out and relaxing. Drew stayed for three days and got to experience boat life first-hand. Was lovely to spend some quality time together; something we haven’t done for a very long time due to living in different parts of WA for the past 20+ years. When it was time to head home and back to work (someone’s gotta do it), he was picked up by helicopter from the point, this time to the excitement of the local camping kids.
It was soon time to think about moving on. Blue Yonder and Eureka IV both departed a day or two before us and then it was time for us to keeping heading north. We were getting excited about Kalani and Martin’s visit as well as seeing Jen and Ian on their annual caravan trip to Exmouth.
Leaving Warroora required exiting out through the reef, so we picked a day of low swell to make this passage as safe as possible. We had light easterly winds and calm seas as we made our way to Coral Bay.