Thursday, 29 May 2014                                                                                               53.1kms

It was very windy this morning so no boating. We all, except Poppy, went for a walk down the beach to where Gordon had caught his barracuda to retrieve the teeth for Hendrix. Gordon had done a great job of marking it for Nath, putting a stick in it and drawing a rectangle around it. Unfortunately no crabs had even touched it as Nath had hoped for, so he dug up a really stinky fish carcass. Then the next job was trying to detach the stinky head from the rest of the body, as he wanted to take back as little as possible to camp. Ideally we would have liked just the jaw bones, but that was impossible, especially without a knife or hammer. I found Nath a piece of strong, sharp shell to cut the mankie fish with so he ended up with just the head. And boy did it stink! None of us would walk with him and stayed up wind to avoid the smell.

I found Nath on the beach next to our boat, knife in hand trying to detach as much flesh as possible before taking what was left back to camp to boil. Boiling it in our camp oven in camp probably made us the least popular camp for anyone downwind of us. It was rotten. Nath decided that it was a BAD idea to wait a couple of days and next time he does something like this, he will do it with a fresh carcass. After boiling the head for about an hour and letting it cool, he took it to the beach and emptied the camp oven into a hole above the high tide mark. Boiling it had done the trick and the skull was in pieces. Nath then had the fun job of trying to remove the teeth from the bone without damaging them. Some came out easily, while others needed a whole bunch of convincing. The size of the teeth was impressive. Hendrix was very proud of his barracuda teeth and showed them off to Oscar and Ethan, as they had come to see what was happening around our boat.

With all of the excitement of the teeth over and the bones buried, low tide was almost upon us. We had planned to go to Mangrove Bay before sunset at low tide so Nath could try to find the really big mud crabs to video and show the kids. So the 5 of us set off, again leaving Poppy in camp to read his book. We arrived in time to walk out on the mudflats with the sun getting low on the horizon. The only down side to this nice picture is the masses of sandflies buzzing around our heads and under our hats. Elokin was getting absolutely mauled so I decided to take her back to the car and spray her with aeroguard. Nath and Hendrix went the furthest and were out the longest, with Nanny choosing to follow us back to the car also. Hendrix has a very sharp eye, spotting the huge mud crab for his dad. He was an angry muddy too, chomping his claws at the GoPro.

We girls went to the bird hide, free from bitey bugs, but there wasn’t a great deal of birds to see this evening. The colour of the sunset was really nice over the water in the billabong. It was a lovely way to end the day.

Until next time…. Happy and Safe Travels.