Central Coast Qld

Yaaaayyyy. The sun is shining and we are back in shorts and t-shirts. Brian found a walk of about 5km along the river. Unfortunately there is no view of the river as it’s all scrub and bush. Not my idea of a pleasant walk, so I stayed in bed. What a surprise. We went on a drive around the area of Tannum Sands and Boyne Island and it is obviously suburbs of Gladstone. If I had to work in Gladstone and a lot of people do- the alumina smelter employs 17500 people alone, I think these suburbs would be a pretty nice place to live. There are lots of parks along the foreshore and the council has just spent millions on the beautification of the esplanade where we are. It is fantastic. Lots of lawns, trees, playgrounds and BBQs right on the beach and river. It goes for about 2kms and is obviously popular with both locals and tourists alike. Seeing we were here, we thought we had better check out Gladstone itself. It’s about 25 kms away to the north with a very good road – not the Bruce Highway! We had a little difficulty finding the city but we had actually driven right through it and hadn’t recognised it as Gladstone. Thought it was a small suburban street with a couple of shops! We found an information centre and discovered our mistake. The info centre was at the Marina which was surrounded by parks and gardens and a nice foreshore walk. We both oohed and aahed over the boats from yachts to fishing boats to the huge twin hull cruiser that takes passengers to Heron Island.

Nice as the marina area was, you just can’t get away from the fact that this is a working industrial port. There were many ship on the horizon just waiting for their turn to fill up with aluminium, coal or cement. It had a similar feel to Newcastle or Burnie.

We had a bit of a relax this afternoon waiting for the tide to come in so I could go fishing. We headed down to the river, along a sandy beach area and sat in the sun or a while. You could hardly call it fishing as I didn’t even get one nibble. There was a family group near us and one of their kids caught a puffer fish. Or should I say jagged a fish. She was teasing the fish just on the shoreline and flung here rod out as soon as a fish came near. The hook caught the fish in it’s side. Not necessarily an orthodox catch, but hey the fish was out of the water. We stayed for about an hour enjoying the sunshine until it quickly started to disappear and headed back to the van for a cuppa where we are sitting outside enjoying the late afternoon bird chorus. (Brian is on alert to chase away the ducks and bush turkeys)