2015/11 Australia trip - Fitzgerald Bay |
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We were heading back up the east side of the Eyre Peninsula towards our next target, the Flinders Ranges national park, but were taking two days so we could also visit the Arid Lands park near Port Augusta. We left the park, skirted Port Lincoln and drove north on the Lincoln Highway, mostly through farming country, with occasional views of beaches and the Spencer Gulf.
I’d found that there is a jade mine in the Eyre Peninsula and we were going to call in on the jade shop in Cowell. The town is pretty with its old buildings but when we opened our doors the heat hit us like a hammer. It was 38C, just under 100F with seaside humidity to match, a shock for us as it had been dry and even chilly for most of our drive.
We decided that eating lunch in the air conditioned Commercial Hotel would be good; it was a gloomy cavern of a place with only two other customers but the food was tasty. The barman must have been used to talking over a bar full of Australians, because we could hear him all over the building.
The jade shop was on the north edge of town in a motel. We went around in circles until we realized the 1st and 2nd streets were perpendicular to 3rd and 4th, not what we are used to.
The lady in the jade shop showed us the carvings they had. The jade was discovered in the sixties when a mine owner found he had some strange rock that he 
couldn’t break with a hammer and this turned out to be jade. It’s now mined with explosives and carved with diamond drills. This jade is nephrite similar to BC’s and it’s also carved in China so Sandie wanted something different from BC’s bears and dolphins. The boomerangs were flimsy and expensive but there was a nice highly polished club-like design that she liked. The lady said that it was a New Zealand pattern but she didn’t remember the name. She packed it for us and added some documentation about the mine and its jade; this would turn out to be important on our trip home.
The highway turns inland at Cowell and we were into an area of old gold and silver mines and today’s massive iron mines near to Iron Knob, a town we’d passed through over a month ago. The next town is Whyalla, with its steelworks and port. We were going to camp on the beach on Fitzgerald Bay to the north. We had to drive through a narrow corridor across a military reserve area, with warning signs for unexploded ordinance. The road was built for mammoth trucks carrying ore to a shipping pier, but it also gave us access to a recreation area on Spencers Gulf.
Camping there was free and unorganized. The beach looked to have three distinct colour zones, brown, white, and grey. It was tempting to set up camp in the brown zone amongst the trees at the water’s edge. But nobody else had, so we found a spot in the grey zone.
Our first surprise was that the weather was perfect, very different from that in Cowell. We sat and watched the tide come in rapidly and climb up to cover the 
whole brown section and most of the trees. It was an enormous tide, due to the shape of the gulf perhaps. Those trees must be some kind of mangrove to survive being drowned in salt water twice a day. It was a great campsite with few flies and no biters. We could hear giggling kids taking their boat around the trees. This was our view at sunset, with the tide still coming in
Tuesday November 10th
It was windy at dawn, and high tide again, a few hours early; there must be a complicated tide pattern there at the head of the gulf.