Another early surf at Yallingup and once again, overhead on the sets and winding off down the reef. Not perfect by any means but absolutely fine and much longer rides than you'd have at a beachie. I still don't get sick of the setting here, it's really a beautiful spot. We saw some grey aquatic creature breach the surface right near us, thrash around for a second, then disappear. Dolphin or shark? Usually dolphins come back up to breathe and you see them again. But not always. Hmm. Oh well, plenty of fish around for the sharks to eat so hopefully they don't need to snack on surfers. Was probably a dolphin. Hmm.
We packed up camp and heading into Busselton for Nessie's rego inspection. The mechanic was an older, very serious looking guy with a clipboard and big torch. He told us to leave the truck with him and come back in an hour. Um, usually it takes about 10 minutes to do a rego inspection in NSW! Not good, surely he'd find something that will cost us another half a surfboard worth of our hard earned cash! Exhaust, radiator, seatbelts. We both had a top 5 of things we could get pinged for.
Surpisingly, came back to only one issue that would fail us, too much play in the steering (the tie-rod ends for the geeks). Even more surprising, the guy offered us his workshop and tools to fix it ourselves on the spot and he'd sign us off! He ended up helping us and we got her up on the hoist, whipped off the front wheels with the airgun and did the job in about 10 minutes. What a legend! Before leaving town we picked up a sixpack for the guy and dropped it off with our thanks.
Got ourselves up to Perth (really nice drive through the farmland) and found our campground for the night at Advent Park. We'd only realised after we booked it that it was actually a Seventh Day Adventist thing so we didn't really know what to expect! It turned out to be a big site with church and youth-group sort of accommodation, and an area for random travellers to camp. We set up and then headed into Fremantle to meet up with Matt and Sarah (whom we'd visited in Singapore, now living back in Melbourne and visiting us for a long weekend). Had dinner and a couple of beers in a nice pub called the Norfolk Hotel.
Got back way past my bedtime (usually 8:30-9pm these days) but Jack had to stay up to pick up his mum from the airport (also visiting us for a bit). I didn't envy him as I sunk into a deep sleep. Mary ended up landing at 2:30am. Ouch!
Surf: Yallingup, WA, 3-4 foot, 1.5hr (98.0 total)
