We awoke to another beautiful day with the sun rising over Dixon Island. As it was Sunday we had planned to go in to Karratha for church and then explore the area including Dampier…

Karratha Anglican Church was very welcoming and the people there had come from all over Australia – many of them to work in the mines and mostly all young families…

After a lovely time of fellowship, we went into the town centre to Lo’s Café and enjoyed coffee sitting in the well-groomed park outside… there were some interesting sculptures and a water feature – all in all a great place to relax…

We then drove on towards Dampier – past the Rio Tinto salt mines….

and very interesting little sculptures in the salt crystallizers – there was an Elvis…

a Nativity scene…

a shark school….

And others…

Each salt crystallizer is harvested after 18 months when the evaporation of the sea water has caused a salt layer of 300-500mm to form. An average of 420 000 tonnes of water is evaporated each day in the Dampier crystallizers. 67 tonnes of seawater yields 1 tonne of salt. The salt is washed after harvesting and stockpiled ready to be shipped.

Arriving in Dampier we stopped at the Red Dog memorial statue… made famous by the movie of the same name…

Next stop was Dampier lookout which gave us a great view over the town and the port of Dampier….

You could see the ships waiting to be loaded up and the conveyor belt that the Rio Tinto salt was loaded on with…

The palms looked inviting down on the beach area, so we drove down to look for a place to have lunch…

The beach was lovely, and the area had been well planned and landscaped….

We walked over to the sailing club and decided to stop there for lunch…  “The Shack” was serving cocktails so we took advantage of that… Beryl enjoying a delicious looking mocktail…

Dave was very excited as the Swannies were playing so he went upstairs to watch the game…

Trev and Gordie went for a quick dip…

We drove past one of the jetty’s where iron ore was being loaded onto the big cargo ships…

As we were cooking a communal roast that night we then headed back to camp after picking up some supplies…driving past some harvested crystallizers still with their little sculptures intact….

While dinner was cooking, we went for a walk over the rocks as the tide was a long way out….

There were some creepy things in the rock pools…. Lots of octopi that squirted water at you as a defence mechanism…

some small colourful coral outcrops as well….

The sun set and we sat down to a delicious roast dinner with pavlova (courtesy of Beryl) for dessert…

The hermit crabs were out again… accompanied by a spider carrying her million babies on her back…. Cleaverville Beach was up there with Sheringa Beach in SA for after-dark creepy crawlies….