I don’t know how I did it, in adeliade I managed to swindle a nice hotel room, with beer fridge and this strange object on top of the desk….it was about 22inch and there were little people in it, music and a load of channels…plus we also had these things called windows, that actually opened?? how bizarre, the little box thing is called a TV or something…..not seen one for such a long time….well I needed to catch up, we were two mins away from the shark invested waters of adeliade beach, a protection net, lay strewed across the horizon, a pier penetrating the sea and on the bank the Rodney Fox museum. Okay a little information on Rodney fox:
Rodney Fox was attacked by a Great White Shark and badly bitten around the chest and arm in December 1963. His story of the attack and escape has been published many times. He is regarded as a miracle survivor of one of the world’s worst shark attacks. This man then turned his hand at protecting the creatures, and was the lead specialist in the Jaws movies!
So being as we where gonna be introduced to the sharks in the next couple of day we figured we’d go and have a look, just similar to watching a series of horror movies before staying in a haunted house, well this place was an Aladdin’s cave of shark memorabilia, information and horror stories, first thing you see as you walked in, was a load of scrap books, packed with newspaper stories about attacks and deaths due to sharks, surprisingly, not so much the great white, but the tiger shark, I sat and watched a documentary about the sharks….well I was giddy, but a little apprehensive, I was going to see the Apex predator of the oceans in the domain!!
Morning came and we hoped on our prop plane and flew to millionaires mainland Port Lincoln, these people had made a shed load of cash from fishing, the blue tip tuna, you catch one and you get $1600AU per fish!! As there was not really much chance of us staying in a hostel, we stayed in the Hilton….okay the Hilton Motel, another genius find by me, on the beach, with signs littering the shore to say if you see a shark in the water report it straight away….these things would attack you in shallow water, mistakenly, obviously but still if you go into semi deep water, your chance of attack in peak season is well highly likely!
Two days in Port Lincoln, sampled fresh seafood and drove out to see some of the country side, to be stopped randomly by Roos and emus, casually walking on the side of the road, or hoping across in some cases, well to me it was pretty cool…an emu suddenly popping up at the side of the car or a roo bounding across the road!! We saw some amazing place, dried salt lakes, amazing sand dunes, rolling towards the sea and amazing sunsets…but the shark cage was always forefront in my mind!!
So the shark cage eve was up on us, like a child on christmas eve, I couldn’t sleep, so had a beer from the fridge…just to help obviously.