Early July in Coffs Harbour

Well, after arriving here nearly in early May, we are now about to set sail in our caravan again and head further north. We are stopping at Ballina to see some friends for a few days, before continuing further North to Byron Bay (recommended by many people as worth visiting) and then over the next border into Queensland.

 Here are some recent photos of our last couple of weeks here in Coffs Harbour.

Often the waves were quite massive and foaming

and they took some escaping from. Either you get away quick or you get wet feet !

We had log throwing game where the log had to end up in the hole in the sand and sticks in the sand marked your location.

There was a park nearby where the children often walked with Kaya.

One day, late in the afternoon, we went over Muttonbird Island, which is home to MuttonBirds (as you may have guessed). Now, these are a type of....

...bird. (Did you guess that one?)

There was a lovely sunset. Being in these parts nearer to the equator and it being winter, the sun starts setting at around 5pm.

We were fortunate enough to see a humpback whale in the distance which was breaching - this means that it was throwing all 50 tonnes of it's body weight out of the water, rolling in the air then coming crashing down into the water. It was quite some distance away but it was still a spectacular sight.

Crikey, it looks even further away with the camera. The whale is the horizontal line, just to the right of the midpoint of the photo. Honest!

It's not known why whales breach, though various reasons have been suggested, such as courtship, signaling danger or social reasons.

The children had wanted to try their hand at fishing for a while so we got some rods, hooks, sinkers and all that malarky from a certain store which was having a sale. A neighbour, who'd been fishing for years all over Australia, took them and Hayley fishing down to Coffs Harbour Jetty. And they caught this fella!

I think he said it was a whiting. I shall have to ask the children in the morning...

I met them after school and they were so chuffed to have caught something. It's difficult to tell the scale in the photo, but to give you some idea, the circular pond it is swimming in is about 10 metres in diameter.

(Okay okay, it's not a pond. It's a bucket).

We enjoyed it so much that we all went again a couple of weeks later.

We didn't catch anything, but it was an entertaining afternoon out.