Karumba (sorry we haven't had internet for a while)

We spent just over a week in Karumba. Karumba is a really nice little town. It has a permanent population of only 600 but from around April – October it swells to 2000-3000. The majority of these extras are all “Grey Nomads” who move to Karumba and set up home in the caravan parks for the winter. They go there every year, plant vegetable gardens around their caravans and enjoy the great weather, fantastic fishing and watch amazing sunsets over the water every night from the pub’s beer garden.

For most of our time there we couldn’t take our boat out because we were waiting for the new part to arrive. But we enjoyed those days learning and practicing throwing the cast net to catch bait (you are not allowed to use a cast net in NSW, so we had never used one before). We tried fishing off the banks but without any luck. Aidan and Cody enjoyed playing games of footy on the beach each day and swimming in the pool.

While fruit and vegetables up here are very expensive and terrible quality the one thing they do have is cheap and great seafood, we got stuck into the prawns for just $10kg!

Once our boat was fixed we got out on the water. Even though everyone was saying the fish were off the bite due to the winds which had come through and a drop in water temperature, we still had a great couple of days pulling in fish. We were all pulling in plenty of Bream, Cody landed a good sized Grunter (which was a very tasty fish) and Aidan hauled in a nice Jewel Jew fish. We also got a couple of extremely tasty mud crabs! So life was pretty good for a few days eating fish, mud crabs and prawns for 4 nights in row!

Another very interesting thing we discovered up here is that there are not the standard 4 tides a day (ie 2 high and 2 low tides all 6 hours apart). Up here most of the time there are only 2 tides a day, but sometimes there are 3, sometimes 4 and once or twice a month there is only 1 tide in a day!