A Southern Right Whale waves to us

Towards the western end of the Nullabor Plain is Head of the Bight. This is the sort of northern scoop out of the land mass and provides warmer and protected waters for Southern Right whales to breed and calve (sometime later). They were hunted way back in the 1800s. Eyre even saw remains of their bones washed up here after the Dutch and others had been whaling in the Southern Ocean. They are so called because they were the ‘right’ whale to catch – good for oil and whatever else they used to harvest. This area is now a major breeding ground for them and they have built a great information centre and viewing platforms to get quite close to the whales.

A Southern Right whale and her calf.

We saw about a dozen mums with their young calves. They stay close together, and slowly drift along the cliffs in front of us.

A Southern Right Calf flapping its fin.

The calves roll around and flap their fin on the water making a huge noise we can hear from the shore. Their fins must be a couple of metres long. And the size of the adult whales is about two double decker buses.

We watched for almost an hour. We ran into the Slovakians we helped through the mud a few days ago near Balladonia. They had been watching the whales all day! They might get really old houses in Slovakia but, clearly, they don’t get whales.
After the whales, we continued across the Plain. Somewhere it suddenly changed from treeless to thick bush. I was driving but I really can’t say where it happened. It was very, very, very windy. The wind got stronger and stronger as the day went on. We came across the western extent of cultivated land as we passed huge fields of wheat. It was  more golden here than the crops we had seen near Esperance and not far off harvest.
We left the Long Straight Road and went south after Yallata Roadhouse, which isn’t a roadhouse anymore. It still gets a dot on the map though. We went towards Fowlers Bay, with the wind gathering momentum. If you heard about 100km/h winds lashing Adelaide – that’s the wind we had, but we got it first. I still don’t know how the kayak and surfboards stayed on the roof. We got caught in a web of tracks trying to find a place to camp near Fowlers Bay. After at least an hour, maybe more, and just as it was getting dark, we plonked ourselves in a spot among some rare bushes. It was awful. The relentless wind made it a night we all wanted to forget. At least it wasn’t raining.