Easter 2006 Trip to Stanage Bay

For Easter this year we went to Stanage Bay.
It is about 800km north of Brisbane and takes about 9 to 10 hours to get there.
From Brisbane to Rockhampton it is about 630km, then it is about 80km on the bitument north to the turnoff then 100km on the dirt to the bay. The dirt road was is ordinary condition when we drove in due to all of the rain, on the way back it was better due to the local council grading it.

We went with some other friends - the Dagan Family, the Evans Family and Damien and Alonie.

This is a picture of the living room in our fishing shack with Emily. There were three bedrooms (all with bunks) and a sofa/bed in the living room. There was a toilet and shower upstairs and downstairs, 2 fridges, mozies, 2 freezers, plenty of power, mozies, ceiling fans, pool table downstairs, mozies, a BBQ on the verandah upstairs and sandflies.
The house was on town power, had a good supply of rain water thanks to the recent rain (the first good rain in many years - the tanks overflowed at one point) and borewater for non-essential water.

This is the kids who went, left to right :

Dallas, Sophie, Jessica and Caleb on the floor (and Christelle at the table).

The Evans' That is Darin in the blue shirt with Lisa - her back to the camera. There is Emily (front left), Christelle and Jeff with a beer.

Christelle in the kitchen.

The Ruskins (sorry Alonie)

This is Alonie playing pool with all of her friends.

And this is Damien drinking in the Kitchen.

We had a bunch of fun. Emily and I were a bit crook with gaestro (!) for the first few days. Also the mozzies were pretty bad and the fish were not really biting - thank god for mud crabs and beer !
Each family were supposed to bring certain food items and we were going to pool it all up to make meals. I thought that we could live off the fishing skills of the men folk but then again - luckly we didn't ! As a result though everybody brought too much food, Damien brought very near a whole cow and half a pig - so we did not want for protein. The beer lasted long enough.

Jeff took his 4.2m tinnie (there is a good picture further down of the tinnie). We did a lot of fishing and crabbing. There was an annual fishing competition on over the Friday/Saturday of the Easter long weekend - as a result there were a lot of people in town. The town itself is a small fishing village on a body of water called Thirsty Sound (sort of apt really). It has a 2 lane boat ramp, a store with a pub (the people who run it though are about the rudest I have ever met) and marine outlet/boat shop/tackle shop.

That crabbing in great fun, you basically bait crab pots with freshly acquired kangaroo meat - read into that what you may :-) and then leave it some place tied to a mangrove, come back and check at least every day.

Crab pots above.

We ended up getting4 keeper crabs, this was not many but the size we got was substantial. We got one crab to 2.008kg - that is about 4.4 pounds.

Below is Jeff and Damien contemplating life over a beer and a crab cooker.

The crab gets put into the boiler.

In the above phot sequence we see us lads cooking the crabs, actually we waited about 2 hours for the water to boil. In the end we had to sacrifice the door from the garden shed in order to acquire a lid for our pot ! Eventually you see the lovely cooked red/organe crab - they tasted very nice.

You can keep mud crabs alive for many days, you have to tie them up though. This is no easy task though as their claws have been known to remove small digits from limbs ! If you do not tie them up they also tend to be a bit canabilistic and will even mutilate themselves.

You can see the size of the crab in Damien's hands. He is not used to holding anything that big in his hands - or so he told me :-)

Below are the images of when Damien took us out to Alonie's Mum's husband's cattle property just outside of Stanage Bay - Hollins Bay. It is a 38,00 acre property.

It is a very nice property. The drought had broken in the weeks before we had got their and as such the whole place has delightfully green and very wet. We eneded up getting bogged a couple of times in the little buggy we were getting around in.

This is Jeff near the buggy before we left. It is a little Suzuki Sierra that has seen its fair share of action around Hollins Bay. Even when we were out this time we (Jeff and Damien - I did not plan getting that dirty and I am not a very good mechanic) had to fix a lose coupling or something under the vehicle. You have to admire a couple of blokes who can just pull up in the middle of nowhere and fix a vehicle with the few tools they had on hand.

Emily asking the question - do you have enough bullets ? (Damien's answer was something like - can you ever have enough ?). Damien and Jeff took their respective guns as we were lookng for feral pigs. We did not see any but shot at a few idle targets still. I hadn't fired a rifle for a while - it was a hoot.

The shot below is a great one to finish off with, Jeff and his eldest Dallas, Damien loading the guns and Emily in the foreground.