After leaving Louisa Bay, we headed to the tip of the island to our next camp spot, Turtle bay, just for a night.
You need to go through the cat proof (electric) fence that has been erected. The lower (Southern) half of the island has been cleared of feral cats and native wildlife is slowly being re-introduced with great success. All the sheep and goats have been removed from the island, at one stage there were 20,000 sheep being farmed here!
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Withnell Point Camp would be a choice spot to stay, very beautiful calm and sheltered bay.
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Before heading to our camp, we checked out the various spots at the top end,
Cape Inscription Lighthouse was interesting with a few story boards explaining the arrival of Dirk Hartog and other explorers over 400 years ago.
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Dampiers landing spot, which was not too far away. This was the first known place that Europeans set foot in Australia.
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Not far from here a French Whaling ship, the Perseverant, came to grief and the the crew set up camp for a couple of months.
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Cape Inscription viewed from Turtle Bay Camp. It is called Turtle Bay as this is the largest loggerhead turtle nesting site in Australia. We'll come back here in the summer months to see this hopefully.
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Our camp at Turtle bay:
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We went for a wander down the beach and got the surprise of our lives, hundreds of baby sharks swimming in the shallows just a couple of metres from shore, I think these are some kind of reef or lemon shark) Most were around a metre long but there was the odd bigger one. Needless to say snorkelling was off the agenda for the afternoon's activity.
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A video of the sharks on my Youtube. This was an amazing sight to see, we spent a while here just watching them swimming around.
After leaving Turtle Bay, we took a different route back down the Northern section of the island. We called into a couple of fishing shacks along the way. It was interesting just to read the walls covered with the musings of past travellers trips.
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This spot is called the Block due to the great 700 Tonne lump of limestone that was ripped out of the cliff and dumped here by a Tsunami way back when.
I had a mate who was Fishing at steep point in 2006 just across the bay from here and they had a tsunami caused by an earthquake off Java inundate their camp site, it wrote my mates car off and destroyed the camp spot, he had his ribs broken when the gas bottle hit him!
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