Fishing at Broome

Friday 26th June
Broome is really starting to grow on me, its this tropical oasis located many kilometers from anywhere, yet quite metropolitan and providing all goods and services we are used to from larger cities.
The weather is unbelievable at this time of the year - nights are mild (20°C), mornings are coolish (15°C) and daytime is beautiful with 25°C before lunch and 30°C after lunch. The sky is always clear and the sea is always calm and very light breeze makes beach time really pleasant. There are no Mosquitoes, Sandflies or other insects at all. We sit outside at night time under our white fluorescent light, which would attract millions of insects back home, but there are virtually no insects.
The kids love our coconut spotting tours around Broome where I drive and they look, when we find a coconut on the ground we stop and pick it up. Alexander loves to drink the fresh coconut milk straight from the coconut and then we both share the sweet, white flesh inside.
The houses around here look very different - no tiled roofs, they are made of very well secured tin to make them cyclone resistant. No guttering as the high rainfall during the wet season would be too much for even the largest of guttering.
There are numerous signs indicating the current cyclone warning stages and pointing out location of emergency shelters. I found it very interesting to see a Boab tree in the middle of a roundabout tied down with a number of steel ropes. The soil there is so sandy and trees so shallow rooted that they blow over in a strong wind.
The caravan park we are in had most of its trees damaged or uprooted in the last cyclone in 2000. However, most of the trees survived by being propped up and put back into the ground as their root system doesn't get destroyed during the uprooting.
School times are also different up here, kids start school at 8am and finish at 2:10pm. This leaves much more time for play in the afternoon.
Broome is like another little world within Australia, a sort of island with its own rules, climate and population.
Today was another easy day - I'm finally feeling like I'm on a holiday! We started with our daily trip to the bakery and the fishing tackle shop before Alexander and I headed for the big jetty to do some fishing. We got there an hour or so before the top of the tide and it was running furiously - there was no way we could keep our bait on the bottom, the tidal flow would always lift it up no matter how many sinkers I put on. We expected the flow to stop at high tide, but to our amazement it kept running as strong as ever. I don't quite understand the physics behind this phenomenon, but it sure got me confused. We went back for lunch and then over to Ron and Vicki's caravan to fit a couple of heat extraction fans to their fridge - a must to keep the fridge working effectively on hot days.
By the time we finished the work it was 5pm and we rushed down to the jetty for some more fishing at low tide. When we arrived we found a very different landscape as many parts of the coastline were now out of the water. It was much easier now to keep our bait on the bottom and we were rewarded with biting fish. Although the fish were rather small (15-20cm) there was plenty of them on the bite and Alexander was so pleased with his success that we continued fishing well after sunset utilizing the street lights on the jetty. Spanish Mackerel on the dinner plate brought another near perfect day in Broome to an end - now there's only 4 days left before we move on.