Imagine. You are sitting in a 12 seat, twin hulled speed boat powered by 2 x 300hp outboards. Top speed is 60 knots, current speed is 34 knots. But you are not moving forward, just rocking & rolling from side to side. On either side, a mere 3m away, are towering cliffs! Welcome to the Horizontal Falls.
To keep it to a mere paragraph. Up in the Buccaneer Archipelago there is a place with a gap of around 6m between the open sea and a very large pool; followed by a smaller gap of around 4m between the ‘pool’ and a large ‘inland sea’. The water is 30m deep. Add an 11m rise and fall in tide and you have the two Horizontal Falls.
We were dancing in the larger gap with a difference of around 2m (and rising) between the two water levels, already the smaller gap was impassable. By crikey, the adrenalin was pumping almost as quickly as the current. Grown men yelling like cowboys and women screaming – oh yeah.
The highlight of the day it may have been: but we also enjoyed a seaplane flight; swam with sharks, found more fantastic scenery; tucked in to a ‘barra barbie’ for lunch; and more. Sue took 500 photos on the day – hopefully sometime we can share, say, 100 with you .
We arrived back in Derby and wondered whether or not we should just pack it in and head home now – what could be better than this day?
Overnighted half way between Derby and Broome; ready to rock in to Broome early to try and secure a site; we already knew which park we wanted.
Arrived at Roebuck Caravan Park, on City Beach, at 8.45am. They had only one (small) site available – “Have a look at C9, see if you can fit in” they said at the office. We looked! Neither of us are quite built for running these days, but we did walk back quite briskly to secure a waterfront site just 6 paces from the water at high tide. Man – maybe there is life after the Horizontal Falls after all. Decided we could put up with a week ($200); already thinking of a second week.
Broome is very much a tourist town; with the emphasis on the weather and the beach rather than ‘attractions’. Competition tends to keep prices of food, drink and entertainment in hand. So we are generally laying back and lazing around. Geoff has a bit of Oakdale work to get through – but with an office like this he is not finding it too hard to cope!
Had an almost surreal experience Thursday morning. With an exceptional low tide that morning (7.40am) you could walk out about 1km to the wrecks of 3 Catalinas which had been sunk during a Japanese air raid in 1942. Unusual weather conditions had produced a thick sea mist (airport closed) with visibility of around maybe 50 metres. So you found yourself walking through a fog out across the tidal flats, following the group in front in the hope that they knew where they were going, to eventually arrive at the wrecks.
And on the way out we witnessed a ‘white’ rainbow. Seriously folks! Got to say the wrecks themselves were a bit on a par with the dinosaur footprints mentioned last week- the journey, undertaken hopefully, was better than the arrival! Mark Twain would certainly approve of Broome.
Enough for this week. As for choosing photos – ready to give up.
Think I might have got our picassa web link up and running. Try pasting the following address for photos from Andamooka to in fact Kakadu (geographically speaking)
Will try to get it better set up and more extensive if we get some positive feedback.
