Escape from Alcatraz and the Screams in the Night

Many of you reading this blog now will think that Sue and I have the best job in the World. In some respects this is probably true, but in others it is certainly not the case.

The upside is the great place to live, with the abundant natural beauty, the river teeming with life and the great weather during the cooler months. We also have a fair degree of autonomy to "run" Cossack the way that we feel is best.

The downside is the nature of the job: being on-duty around the clock -seven days a week, for nine months straight; being a virtual prisoner of the very place that we have grown to love - our contracts stipulate that at least one of us must be present at Cossack at all times, or at least make arrangements for someone to be present and finally, I regret to say, having to put up with decrees from "above" made by people whom have never taken the trouble to find out what it is that we really do.

Some would think that having a three month paid-break each year is something that you could only dream of - and it is - but working continuously for nine months wears one down. By the end of the nine months we are at the end of our tether. The three months off cannot come soon enough.

And so it was that this year, we made our preparations to travel with great anticipation. We had to get out of that place! We started preparing much earlier than we usually do. There was much to be done to get the caravan in working order, the most important item being to fix a leak in the roof. All preparations went as planned and we could see that we weren't going to be rushing around like mad things at the last minute - what a change that is!

With a couple of days to go before we were due to leave, it was time to empty out our house and pack our worldly possessions away. (Most of you will not know that we have to vacate the house that we live in so that the Relief Caretaker has a place to live. It's like moving house once a year, every year.) This is the trickiest time for us as we have to juggle packing the van with clothes and food, emptying the house but keeping enough "stuff" out to carry on our daily tasks and then at the last minute, make the transition to caravan and escape.

Along with this we have to do a handover with the Relief Caretaker. All the while, all that we want to do is get the Hell out of there. I thought that we would be ready by midday on the 21st December 2012 and Sue guestimated about two-thirty. Sue was closest, and at about three o'clock we finally rolled out of Cossack.

Much of the caravan preparation before leaving was directed at getting our vehicle and van weight legal. We have always travelled (unintentionally) overweight and it is a testament to the quality of the Land Rover that it was able to cope with the towball weight being almost double what it should have been and the van being more than 330 Kg too heavy! As we trundled off down the road it was immediately evident that the effort put into fixing this issue had made a difference. The Land Rover (albeit a new one) skipped off down the road without effort, with the the newly reconfigured, lighter, van following obediently behind.

Our faithful pooch, Jazz, was left behind to keep the relief Caretaker, Mark, company and to keep guard over Cossack. We will both miss her but simply cannot fit her in the car when we are packed to travel.

First stop was Karratha (45 Kms), where we took on some fuel and purchased some last-minute provisions (including the all-important booze.) While stopped I performed what was to become a ritual at each stop until we had traveled our first 1000 Km. I had to tighten the nut on a bolt that holds the new tow-hitch to the vehicle. This hitch replaces the Land Rover hitch, which is an abomination and does not allow the caravan to ride level. I had to buy two 24mm spanners just for this job.

Our intention was to get down the road to anywhere and stop for the night. Anywhere except Cossack was the imperative! We called in at Miaree Pool, just 25 Km south of Karratha, but found that camping was no longer permitted there. We checked out a couple of other minor stopping places but they were too close to the main highway and the noise that would be generated by the many trucks that trundle up and down it, day and night.

We do not have a kangaroo bar on the new vehicle, so driving after dark is strictly off the agenda. We were running out of options before finally deciding on stopping at "Rugged's Pub". Rugged is a friend from way back. He works on the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline, which follows the main highway reasonably closely. Rugged doesn't mind a beer on a hot day and when the management of the Pipeline decreed that alcohol could no longer be consumed at the accommodation sites along the way, Rugged had to come up with an alternative. The alternative was a small cleared area on the McKay Creek, about 130 Km southwest of Karratha.

There was room enough to turn the van and enough level ground to be able to park such that we wouldn't roll out of the bed that night. We got there right on dusk. Fortunately, food preparation was unnecessary as Sue, always anticipating some sort of hiccup in our plans, had the forethought to buy us some "Macca's" while we were at Karratha. It would be the last time that we ate junk food for the foreseeable future.




First night campsite at "Rugged's Pub"


Typically for the inland Pilbara, the temperature was a balmy 34 degrees C when we arrived and there was little prospect of it cooling much before we tried to get some sleep. Part of the weight saving measures that we implemented was to leave our generator out. No generator means no air conditioning, so we were just going to have to tough it out.

Good fortune smiled upon us as we sat down to enjoy the light-show put on by a thunderstorm some 100 Km inland from us. That same storm, which initially did not appear likely to reach us and cool us down with some welcome rain, did in fact mange to do just that. It wasn't much rain but it managed to knock a few degrees off of the temperature, allowing us to get to sleep quite easily with just the hatch-mounted fan blowing air over us.

There is something about birds that call out in the middle of the night, especially birds like the Bush Stone Curlew. Click on the coloured link to listen to this guy in action, and imagine what this sounds like when it wakes you up in the middle of the night. Turn your speakers up loud - 'cause the birds sure are! Those screams are absolutely blood curdling and made twice as eerie by the fact that there were two of them, each calling to the other for most of the night.

While the birds did disrupt my sleep, they are kind of cool and I did enjoy listening to them. Needless to say, I wasn't really at the top of my game in the morning.

We were up with the chooks and headed off with just a coffee in us, planning to have breakfast somewhere along the way to our planned destination - Onslow. Neither of us had been to Onslow for many years and we had heard that the town had grown with the influx of workers from the oil and gas industry. The couple of hundred kilometres slipped by without incident and we rolled into town a about eight in the morning.

Yes, Onslow had grown but, sadly, was still as dishevelled as I remembered it from my previous visits. While there were signs that the Council had tried to beautify the place, the token efforts were not enough to lift the town to new heights making you want to stay there. We ate breakfast on the foreshore and then scarpered out of there, making for Old Onslow. As place to visit, I rate Onslow a 3 out of 10.

Old Onslow is essentially the scattered remains of the original Onslow. The original site for the town was almost at the mouth of the Ashburton River, one of the many huge Pilbara rivers that burst their banks when cyclones dump massive rains on their catchments. As a consequence, cyclones repeatedly either blew the town away or washed it away until the townsfolk gave up and relocated some 25 Km away.

Not much remains to show the existence of the old town, save a couple of Government buildings built with stone which, while clearly have been subjected to some restoration, are in need of some TLC. Elsewhere you can see small deposits of rubble, some footings that were evidence of structures in days gone by and some old cast-iron telegraph poles. I would give Old Onslow an "place of interest" rating of 4 out of 10.




What is left of the Gaol at Old Onslow


Right from the get-go we had decided that we did not want to do entire days of just driving and with that in mind we had been looking out for places to camp. There were some nice waterholes along the Ashburton (which was actually flowing - running a rich, almost blood-red colour), but the preponderance of cattle in the area meant that the ground was almost completely covered by land-mines. We drove on.

Along the west side of the Exmouth Cape is the Cape Range National Park and within it are numerous beach side camping places. Although it would mean a long day of driving, we determined to make for one of those campgrounds as there was little else in between.

Before we had even completed the eighty kilometres back to the Northwest Coastal Highway, the outside temperature had climbed to 39 degrees. By the time we reached the Burkett Road (which cuts across from the Highway to the Miniliya-Exmouth Road), it was 42 degrees. Halfway across the Burkett Road, the temperature reached a searing 46 degrees and I had slowed our speed down as a precaution. Hot engines pulling very heavy caravans, along with very hot tyres on very hot roads, is not a great combination.

As the thermometer ticked over to that 46 degrees, we ran into a full-on, screaming, hot headwind. The only good thing about it was that I knew that this was the sea-breeze and it would eventually begin to cool things down. It took a while, but by the time we completed the crossing of the Burkett Road the temperature had dropped to a bearable 36 degrees. We turned north and drove by Learmonth, Exmouth, rounded the tip of the Cape, drove back south again to the entrance to the park and paid two days admission fee and then made our way about eight kilometres to Ned's Camp. It was four thirty in the afternoon and it had been a very long day.





I was standing at our van when I took this shot. Great views eh?

 
We set up camp and enjoyed a light meal as the Sun set over the Indian Ocean. Uncharacteristically, the West Coast sea breeze, which would normally blow for most of the night, ebbed away to a pleasant zephyr before we retired to bed for the night.

That covers the first two days of our latest adventure. So.....why the reference to Alcatraz? Well, most of you would know that Alcatraz is a former prison on an island off San Francisco in the US. Well, Cossack is on an island as well. Twice a month during the spring tides, Cossack is completely surrounded by water. It is only in fairly recent times that a bitumen causeway was laid that enables access all-year-round. Although Cossack is not really a prison, by the end of our nine months, we start to feel like it is. Next post coming soon.