Wanderung 33

Drive Northward from Margaret River

We really wanted to see the aquarium at the end of the Busselton jetty, so after `brekky` we retraced our way there, parked, and walked to the ticket office located at the beginning of the jetty. The aquarium visit comes bundled with the train ride out along the jetty, so we took the 10 o`clock train out to the aquarium.

The acquarium at the far end of the jetty turned out to be a huge cylinder anchored down to the base rock, and equipped with 15-centimeter thick plexiglass Windows from which you can peer out at the life on the small coral reef that is forming on the old wooden pilings that have supported the jetty for over a hundred years.

We saw a fantastic array of corals, sponges, and fish ranging from the really tiny ones to quite large specimens. It was rather like an open water dive on a coral reef, except we didn't get wet or cold! Our guide was Zack, and he explained that they had to don scuba gear and clean off the plexiglas windows each week to preserve the visibility, because otherwise the coral would try to grow on the plexiglass.

We didn't get back to shore until almost 12, so we had lunch at a take out place just above the adjacent bathing beach, and then briefly paddled in the waters of the Indian Ocean just to say we had done it. Then we walked back along the beach and picked up some unique seashells before returning to the car.

We decided to spend 1 hour returning to the Aldi store in Bunbury to get the backup power supply and another beach towel in case we ever actually got to go swimming! While there, we picked up some extra whole-kernel bread because we had both enjoyed it so much for breakfast.

For our afternoon excitement we looped back down the peninsula to see the small lighthouse marking the Naturaliste headland. The flash pattern of the rotating light was a total of a 10 second cycle with a flash at 2.5 seconds and a flash at 7.5 seconds. They had recently replaced the old incandescent light with a LED, but they were still using the original Fresnel type of lens. That all made sense, but I was astonished that the multi-ton light assembly was rotating on a bed of liquid Mercury !

I got a little queasy being that close to such a huge vat of liquid Mercury, but in the old days the lighthouse keepers had to actually kind of wring out the Mercury to keep the contamination from the kerosene smuts from the lamps from literally gumming up the works. That plus breathing kerosene fumes limited their duty times to 4 hours maximum, so there were 3 shifts of light keepers during the night, and correspondingly 3 identical light keeper houses right next to the lighthouse.

From the lighthouse area we curled around side roads to get to a `Sugarloaf` rock formation just offshore about a mile down the bay. We stopped to take pictures of the dramatic scene and were rewarded by seeing whales blowing and breaching just offshore of the lighthouse. Such a pretty sight!

By then it was almost 5 o`clock and time to get home for the evening . We decided to take the more rural Cave Road to return to Margaret River, and that was a felicitous choice. We enjoyed beautiful colonnades of roadside trees, interspersed with an endless variety of small and large roadside vineyards. The sun was slanting through the trees as evening approached, giving the scene an almost magical air.

So much cheered by a pretty end to a fantastic day, we had some soup for dinner and relaxed until it was time to turn in for the night.