The starting point

The starting point

Thursday 14 March 2024

25/2/24 Esperance

 

    On the track again , heading to Esperance for a week . Weather is not behaving itself , with overcast and sometimes rain spoiling things for us . Nothing else to do except go out and do what we feel . The new pier needed us to go for a walk out to the end . This is the new pier as the old one was falling down , it's quite a bit shorter as well , but a nice walk out . It's extremely popular for the fisher people , there were at least 20 out there today , then there were all the others that decided to do what we were doing . I did manage to get some photos with minimal extra's involved .


    The port isn't far away either , one ship filling with iron ore on the left , and the other filling with wheat.


    In the park beside the new pier is a life-size sculpture of a " Lumper " . They were the backbone of the port in there early days , often being called upon to load the bags of wheat onto the ships etc . A lot of the farmers around the region would supplement their income by working down at the port lumping bags of wheat around - they had to be fit , the bags weighed 90kgs !!


    Another sculpture features 3 ships rudders in a compass setup . The rudders can be moved around , as they pivot on an axle .


    Here's the granite headland at the eastern end of West Beach . A large chunk of granite has separated from the main rock . There's a man and a dog on the beach to give a size comparison .


    Heading around to Salmon Beach to see some men fishing out on the rocks - they were up to their knees in water as waves crashed over the rock shelf . There are attachment points in the rock so you can tether yourself to the rocks to save you getting washed away - these guys weren't  tethered , and to be fair the ocean wasn't being nasty , not that that means it couldn't be dangerous at any moment .


    These plants look like they come straight out of an aquarium , and were growing quite well here .


    There's a life ring on a post up higher on the rocks to be used when required - it seems like the time it would take to get the ring down to the water and thrown in to assist someone , would be longer than they might be able to survive in the rough water .


    Next day we got the bikes out and had a ride along the foreshore . There's Norfolk Island Pines planted along a section of the bay - about 3 kms !


   We stopped at the end of the houses at a carpark and went for a walk down to the beach . There's another old pier here as well - didn't know that this one existed !! 


    The beach around here is quite nice , this is looking back toward town .


    The wether and salt certainly take their toll on anything that's steel - these were actually steel nuts & bolts .


    Castletown is the suburb and there are some impressive houses looking out onto the bay .


   Back closer to the business area , there's a netted swimming enclosure .

   That's it for a couple of our days in Esperance , more to come . Here's map link :- https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1UitWfT5bvNgdCDUXHuTk_bpN1NhLeT0&usp=sharing

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