Clayton's Crabbing

Tonight (Sunday 9th) is our 4th in Onslow. It’s a very full park now with the school holidays started. It’s hard now to find a vacant toilet or shower at the time you want (or need) it and even the tiniest sites have vans or tents on them, often with their power via double adaptors and cords running across the roads.

The town of Onslow has 850 people-about 600 are aboriginal. It’s a town prone to cyclones, so a lot of the buildings are actually anchored down and a most have metal shutters over the windows. The mosquitoes here carry Ross River Virus, so they spray commercially to kill them and we have to be careful to use insect spray, mosquito coils or cover up!

Today we went crabbing with Beth and James to 4 mile creek. It is supposed to be OK for crabs, but not when we were there. Not being successful crabbers, we threw in our fishing lines and did no good with those either! Never mind, a couple we’d met in Denham arrived, started to chat and gave us a couple of cooked blue swimmer crabs when they heard our sad tale. We ate those, then cooked ourselves some sausages for lunch on the wood fired barbie. Just after we finished our lunch, Russ kindly towed a bogged car and boat out of the river and up the bank. They gave us two big mud crabs which we are cooking right now and will eat before we go to the pub for a roast dinner tonight. So we ended up scoring 4 crabs on our unsuccessful crabbing trip. The claws on one of thosese crabs were nearly as big as my hand!

Russ's towing fee-2 nice big muddies