Venus Bay ~ Our first fish here! & Mt Wudinna

Further south from Baird Bay, we reach the small fishing town of Venus Bay*****. There are many people on the jetty. We like this place immediately. The smell of sea, beautiful jetty and this place looks like there is abundant of fish! Look at this picture; the pelicans seemed to be queuing to eat the fish guts thrown out by the fisherman.

For sure we have to try a hand to fish off this jetty. We bought the simple fishing hand line from Ceduna for $6 so it is time to try fishing for the first time. Off the jetty, as the water is quite clear, we can see some fishes swimming around our squid bait. Angie almost got one tommy ruff herring, but was stolen by a sealion when retrieving the line! Gosh there’s sealion even here at the jetty. . . and it’s so cheeky! Why did we pay $140 for the sealion tour again?? Hahaha. . . Just about that later, a pod of dolphins swam by far at the sea. Erm. . .  the question again. Well, the tour protects you from the shark. We have heard of many shark biting cases in Australia from the news when we work at Madura. So better be safe than sorry. Anyway, the tour almost guarantees swimming with the animals.

At the end of the day, Angie caught her first fish, a Silver Trevally. Then, the second trevally. A family was showing us how to use the fishing rod to catch fish. Peter had a go with it and managed to catch a tommy ruff herring too. It was great experience, learning fishing step by step. Really glad that there are helpful Australians teaching us along the way =)

The lookout from Venus Bay hill.

We stayed at the only caravan park there, paying $23 for unpowered site. It has good camp kitchen and rainwater which is drinkable. We used the oven to cook the trevally, end up it’s like steam fish using the oven, with tomato, garlic and ginger sauce. And just pan fried the tommies. Both tasted real good!

From Venus Bay, we did a detour further south to see the Talia Caves. That's the Woolshed Cave above.

Honestly there isn’t much to see around Talia. So we go back north, heading to Gawler Ranges National Park.

The Gawler Ranges is quite big, and the major towns leading there are Minnipa, Wudinna and Kimba. We stayed a night at Minnipa’s Pildappa Rock***** which has free camping and compost toilet. We planned to drive to Gawler NP the next morning then take a walk to the famous Organ Pipes since the roads into this highlight is for 4WD only. It will be an 8km hike in, 16km return. Probably that’s the reason many people haven’t heard of Gawler Ranges NP, it is not easily accessible and a lot of dirt road.

Pildappa Rock

Sunset @ Pildappa Rock