Jandakot to Broome

Jandakot - Rotnest Island, 26/4/97.

After our short break in Perth, we read up on some GAAP procedures again and headed off to Rotnest Island. The flight was short and simple. As we were heading out a Commercial King Air was chatting to the controlers who identified us as unknown traffic. We soon cleared that one up and after chatting with the King Air on the CTAF we followed them in for a landing on the Island.

The Island is a nice place to visit, unfortunately for us the weather wasnt the best. It wasnt anything bad just a little drizzle, but it detered us from doing anything other than setting up camp.

On the Island we all managed to acumulate a few items, so we descided to send back home as much as we could is Aussie Post Express Packages. Sending home everything we no longer needed or had collected allowed us to make sure we had room for as much fuel as possible. One of the best idea's we came up with on our trip so far.

Rotnest Island - Geraldton, 27/4/97.

Sleeping in has been becoming a bit of a habit, today was no exception. We awoke to a bit of light rain, packed everything up and had a look over the forcast. We delayed our departure to allow the rain to pass and just after 1:00 we were able to leave. We tracked coastal through the Pearce VFR route and onto Geraldton. For the most part the flight was uneventful, however just north of Perth a controller contacted us on the radio and advised that there was conflicting traffic ahead of us at the same altitude heading our way. We advised that we would descend to 1000ft and the helicopter flew overhead us without saying a thing. We wondered if the pilot even saw us. We had made a broadcast earlier which the controler had acknoledged, luckily for us he had either remembered who we were or noted it somehow. Either way if we had been able to identify him we'd have found a way to buy him a beer!

Geraldton - Shark Bay, 28/4/97.

We departed Geraldton late and as we were leaving we noticed some PC-9's were up from Pearce, we would be seeing all sorts military aircraft regularly over the next two weeks. The Locals told us the PC-9's are regularly at Geraldton doing Navex's. The flight to Shark Bay was great, the cloud was at about 4500 feet so it kept well clear of us. As we approached Shark Bay we heard to our suprise a Fokker 50 departing the CTAF and as we got closer we saw a huge runway. For some reason we were all thinking of Shark Bay as a real small place, we were wrong. The terminal area is an open air terminal and fuel was available, we were told at Jandakot that it wasnt so we had planned around it.

We caught a taxi to the Monkey Mia Resort for a couple of days for more R&R.

Shark Bay - Coral Bay, 30/4/97.

We Departed Shark Bay, overflew to Monkey Mia Resort for a photo and flew to Carnarvon for Fuel. On our arrival at Carnarvon we were suprised to see an RAAF Falcon 900 (A26-074) sitting on the tarmac. We taxied around it for fuel, spoke to one of the pilots and took a photo of the two Canberra aircraft at Carnarvon. We walked into the town for some lunch and departed for Coral Bay.

The instructions from the owners was to overfly the Pub and they'd be out the airport to pick us up. While at Coral Bay we stayed in at the resort and the owners as it happens were pilots as well. We had a rest day the next day, Graeme done some diving but other than that we just lazed around.

Coral Bay - Port Hedland, 2/5/97.

We awoke the next morning finding it had poored down raining all night, the Coral Bay strip was wet and on confirming Fuel was still available at Emouth we were told the airstrip was closed due to the rain. Since Exmouth was our next planned refueling stop we went about making new plans. We approached a local operator who sold us some fuel to allow us to get further up the coast without going out of our way. The ownwer of the airstrip advised us to keep to the west side of the strip and we'd be ok, on inspection this was right.

We flew via Onslow to Karatha for lunch and then onto Port Hedland. Since it was Friday we need to be at Port Hedland before the Post Office closed as there was a package waiting for Tony, If we didnt get there we would be stuck there until monday. We were lucky we made it as we couldnt have put up with the place that long.

Port Hedland - Broome, 3/5/97.

We got up early this morning to get out of Port Hedland as soon as we could! You wouldnt even call this place a nice place to visit, let alone living here. Tony left his mobile in the taxi by mistake and the Taxi Driver ransomed it back to him for $15 because she had to drive back to the airport. The weather was really starting to get hot! We were certainly limiting our time in the aircraft on the ground due to the heat, it was at times unbearable.

We went straight to Broome and the airport was real busy, we came accross a Bae-146, Fokker F-28, an Army Twin Otter and a Coastwatch aircraft to name a few. We went into Broome and were having lunch at the bakery when an F-28 flew overhead low on finals for runway 32, it was extremely noisy. We stayed in Broome for a couple of days before departing again.