SUNDAY 24 APRIL     PUNGALINA

This was our day off. Again, it seemed like there might be storms – big cloud build up, but no rain resulted.

O was going to tow the new boat on its trailer to the Bluff Waterhole, further down the Calvert River. The track there was now dry enough to do this. The boat would stay moored there for the season. There was already a boat on the Croc Hole waterhole on Karns Creek – the closest fishing hole to the camp. So, our soon to arrive guests – who were coming for the fishing – would have two areas in which to fish from boats.

Later, when tracks had dried out some more, and could be cleaned up, O planned to have a boat moored at a waterhole further down the river again, that he called Bathtub Springs.

Loved the names O had given places on the property!

The Calvert for much of its length, is a series of beautiful deep waterholes, some as long as maybe six kms, separated by stretches of shallows, rock bars and tangles of dead trees brought down by floods. So it was not possible to take the boats to their destinations by using the river. Even in the lower tidal section, a boat could not travel far upriver before being blocked by sandbars and sections of narrows.

O asked if we wanted to tag along, to help him manhandle the boat into position. For us, that was a chance to see more of the place.

The way out to the Bluff took the same track as to Fig Tree Camp, with which we were familiar, but after some way, kept going straight ahead, where we had turned off to the left to go to that camp.

We saw two wild dingoes in the scrub, not too far from the house. As we were in our Truck, couldn’t ask O at the time, but wondered if one of them was the male he called “Darryl” – the old male who was, presumably – Scunge’s mate and the father of Beau and Locky. He had earlier told us that the house dingoes sometimes take food out to Darryl, so I guess that alone was incentive for him to visit regularly. But he never came inside the fenced home garden area, even though the way in was wide and open.

 A few kms past the Fig Tree turn off, we took a turn to the left from the main track. This led to the river but O had to stop a bit short of it, where the going was rough. Here, we unhitched the boat trailer and manhandled it on further, to the water’s edge, where there was a place shelving enough to enable us to launch the boat off the trailer, then tie it securely to trees on the bank. This was right at the downstream end of the Bluff Waterhole. It wasn’t too hard to get the boat down to the water, but it would have been very difficult for O on his own.

O left to go back home and do more work. We wandered around the edge of the river for a bit, then went back to our camp, to bird watch and laze about for the rest of the day.