East Kimberly: Lake Argyle

After a fabulous week in Katherine we packed up and headed west. With the wet season imminently approaching and the Kimberly calling we made a tough decision to leave Kakadu and Lichfield for another day. Five hours and 500kms later our excitement about reaching the Western Australian border was short lived as we passed through the quarantine station and had to hand over all of the fruit and veg that we had bought that morning! Glitch in the backpacker telegraph line. Verryy grrr… Boaz ate a whole rockmelon on the spot in protest.

Our first stop across the WA border was Lake Argyle. In the early 70’s the Ord River was (controversially!) dammed for farming purposes and voila, you have the second largest lake in Australia. It is so massive that you can only see the whole of it from the air.

We stayed in a lush caravan park at the top of the lake and woke up at first light thanks to having to wind the clock back about an hour and a half. We spent some time hiking, picking mangoes from the plentiful trees in the park (watch out that the birds haven’t got to them first!), swimming in the fabulous infinity pool,

kayaking in the lake (see the dam in the background) and… drum roll.. our first fishing expedition, which I must admit I reluctantly joined to take up the role of official photographer and for moral support!

The fish were plentiful and it was not too long before they were guzzling the prawn bait. And then not too much later Boaz caught a silver cobbler (aka catfish)!! It took a few goes before he caught one that was big enough to take home (the smaller ones were thrown back of course). Our initial excitement gave way to trepidation mixed with a smidge of terror when we realised that in order to eat it, the fish would have to be scaled, gutted and filleted. Luckily a friendly campground neighbour came to the rescue with How-to-Fillet-a-Fish 101 and we had BBQ fish for dinner. I am still digesting the experience, it was all a bit to real for me and my pescatarian status has been given very serious consideration!