Before we leapt onboard our cray boat and benefited from China’s trade kerfuffle, there were domestic duties to be done at our Geraldton Sunset Beach caravan park👍.  It’s become an essential part of our journey to ensure that we stop often enough to wash sheets, towels, assorted clothes and give ATGANI a moderately decent clean.  Every park has a laundry and each has their own unique protocols in place – will it be tokens or coins? will it be the same for washers and dryers? will the office be open to supply tokens (or coins for that matter)?  will there be pegs? will there be too many other people in front of us?  The one thing we know is that the washing machines will be large Maytag appliances – so far, nothing has left the machines cleaner than it went in, and everything is now coloured greige. 

We also had time to visit a couple of local highlights. The delightful “historic” village of Greenough (say Grin-uff) was preserved, if not in aspic, certainly in time, by the National Trust.  Clearly worthwhile, clearly underfunded, but unfortunately, the church we personally desired was still in occasional use and it’s really a bit too far from Cremorne for a weekender!

Sticking to the spiritual theme, and devoting thought to Philip, we toured the Francis Xavier Cathedral(!)👍.  The pretty remarkable priest-architect John Hawes designed and built most of the Catholic churches in this part of the world – this is definitely not St Peter’s but it was impressive, beautiful and a bit art-deco in its own right.  A modest man, Hawes converted from Church of England to Catholicism, worked tirelessly and selflessly in this area and was made a Monsignor.  Vaguely disgusted with these trappings, he promptly departed to the Bahamas to settle down as a benevolent hermit!  Our guide, Cecilia, told us that there’s a push to make him West Australia’s first saint (Rome is on it) but by Morris West’s account (The Devil’s Advocate, 1959), I don’t think he’ll make the cut.

But we hadn’t come for that – we’d come for lobsters!  So, Sunday at 7am (scarcely light), already Kwells-ed, we arrived at the marina, found our boat waiting, climbed on board to meet our laconic skipper Kim and set sail👍.  There were 2 other paying guests who arrived at 7.05 but if it had been 7.08, they would still be standing on the dock.  We were off!  It was cold and blowing a gale but at least not raining.  Safety instructions were rudimentary:  “Ready for the safety briefing?  OK, be safe!” 

Kim used to be a cray fisher for 20+ years, with a licence for 129 pots.  Today he does charters for fishing and tourists (had to get back to the ocean) and has only 12 cray pots on his Tour Operator licence.  Nonetheless, we plunged out into the ocean, found his pots by GPS (I can put them anywhere I like) and started hauling them in using a simple winch and a fair bit of brute force.  It was way too choppy for us to be much involved but we soon had 22 legal sized and very unhappy crays in a crate and headed back to the marina.  He divvied ‘em up, put ‘em in a big plastic bag for us and we left, laden down with crays, perfectly satisfied and yet weirdly unenlightened about the trade, its customs, its finances and its future.  These were the famous “red” WA rock lobsters, allegedly so valued by the Chinese.  Anyway, who cared? We were salivating.

Just so you know, we’ve eaten a few, frozen the rest as green tails, eaten a few more, and they’ve been great!  So far, I’ve stuck to the simple rules – split them, 6 minutes shell-side down on the barbie, lots of garlic butter, 2 minutes flesh side down and start dribbling! 

As so often happens, silver linings have clouds attached.  The constant banging of the boat did my back no good at all, which became obvious the next day.  So, other events around Geraldton were curtailed but we spent an extra day or two there to get me mobile again and saw a few local sights, including the impressive HMAS Sydney II memorial.

But clouds also have silver linings.  Finally we had found an auto electrician (Blake👍👍) to actually physically look at the van to see what might be our problem.  After maybe 45 minutes of digging around with multimeters and fuses and headtorches and screwdrivers and solar panels and stuff, he concluded that our DCDC Charger (nope, me neither) was faulty and needed replacing.  Sadly, he didn’t have the equipment but at least we felt some genuine knowledge might have been gained.  A replacement was hurriedly arranged for delivery to Exmouth and there’s a chance that will be a fix. Hope so!  

Except for the back, Geraldton had been fine and seemed to be reasonably prosperous.  If the lobster trade was in trouble there was no talk of it in public.  The only concern seemed to be the almost universal, “We can’t get staff”.  I had even received good advice from my new barber, Jodie👍👍.  She gave me a haircut and a beard trim, with great competence for only $30 and warned me that the barbers (and the water) north of here were “shitty”, a technical term!  She was a Port Hedland girl, so she might know.  So for us, heading north to Kalbarri and beyond, what could possibly go wrong?