Leaving Ceduna was the start of our journey around the Eyre Peninsula.  We were heading south from Ceduna down the west coast then going up the eastern coast.  We weren’t really sure how long we would need to feel that we had had a good look at the Eyre Peninsula, we were giving ourselves six weeks and hoping that would be sufficient.

Our first stop from Ceduna was Streaky Bay, just a short 111km drive down the Flinders Highway.  We booked into the Discovery Park on the foreshore of the bay.  This park is in a great location and was very big and also very busy.  Our site was a little way from the foreshore but was very big so we weren’t complaining.  Streaky Bay is quite a nice little town and they have a great jetty as well that shows off good views back towards the town.

We did a  couple of drives from Streaky Bay being the Cape Bauer Loop Drive and the Westall Way loop Drive.  These took you past some of the great coastal scenery that is all along the Eyre Peninsula and seems to be what it is mostly famed for.  We also did the drive to Murphys Haystacks which are weather worn granite rocks in a paddock.  At Point Labatt they have built a viewing platform to allow you to view some Australian sea lions.  These are one of Australia’s most endangered marine mammals and the worlds rarest sea lions.  We feel very lucky to have seen them.  It was a very popular visiting spot as well.    Didn’t try our luck with any fishing though this time, thought we would give them a fighting chance for someone else.

Elliston was our next destination from Streaky Bay.  Just a short 127km drive further south.  We stayed at the Waterloo Bay Tourist Park.  It was quite small but as a bonus it had grassed sites which felt like luxury.  We hadn’t seen any grass for a couple of weeks and it was a great change.

Elliston has a pretty good tourist drive called the Anxious Bay Clifftop Drive that showed some great views of the coastline and is dotted with some permanent art work along the way that you can stop and look at to break the drive up.  It is only about 12km in total but fills in a couple of hours if you stop a bit.  We also drove back up the coast a bit a visited the Talia Caves.  These were OK but we were expecting something a little bit more, still worth the drive though.

Next stop from Elliston was the Yangie Bay Campground that was in the Coffin Bay National Park.  This is run by the National Parks and is quite well set up with facilities.  We had a great site that had excellent views out over Yangie Bay.  We did a couple of short walks from the caravan to a couple of small lookouts.  One thing we have noticed since being in the Eyre Peninsula is how dry it is here.  The bush really does need some good rains to bring it back a bit.  While camped here we put out a plastic container of water and it was crowded everyday with birds and kangaroos wanting a drink.  You did feel sorry for the animals living in this dryness.

We did a day drive around the Coffin Bay National Park on their 4WD tracks and this was a ride and a half.  The roads were pretty much terrible and if you weren’t being bounced side to side in sand tracks you were bouncing over rock tracks.  We had our tyres down to 20 psi to get through the sandy sections.  The drive along Seven Mile Beach was pretty cool and reminded us a bit of Fraser Island, it was also nice to do some smooth driving as well.  We drove out to Seasick Bay and Point Sir Isaac.  Not sure if we would worry about coming back to the National Park again.  A lot of being bounced around for not a lot a great scenery.

Port Lincoln was our next destination from Coffin Bay.  This was a quick 63km drive for the day.  Love these short drives.  We have booked into Port Lincoln for a week so time to chill out for a while.  There is also a Bunnings here so that makes it a must stop town for a while.  We were thinking of staying in the Lincoln National Park for a couple of days, but as it is so dry here at the moment the dust is pretty bad if the wind picks up so we decided to stay in town for the week and just do drives.  We booked into the Port Lincoln Tourist Park.  This is a very large park that has great views out over the water.  The sites are terraced so most people have pretty good views. 

I was surprised how big Port Lincoln was, I thought it was going to be smaller than what it was.  They have a great marina development here that has some very nice houses.  Must be a lot of rich fishermen living here.   One day we filled in with a drive to the Lincoln National Park.  The park is fairly large but there are not a lot of roads to follow.  We called in and looked at some of the campgrounds, walked up to the top of Stamford Hill for some nice views over Port Lincoln and surrounding waters then drove out to Donington Beach to the lighthouse.   While at Donington Beach we were lucky enough to sea a pod of around 10 dolphins about 60 metres off the beach swimming around and jumping out of the water.  It looked like they were schooling fish up for feeding.

The weather forecast for one of our days here was for high winds so we decided that we would drive to the museum at Koppio.  The museum gets quite good reviews so we thought this would be good on a forecast crappy day.  Well a crappy day was only half of it, it was absolutely terrible.  The dust was so thick, we haven’t seen a dust storm this bad for a long time.  Being so dry here the paddocks were literally being blown away.  Some of the wind gust were over 85kph.  We did enjoy the museum but our planned picnic lunch didn’t happen.  It was a good thing we had closed up the caravan before we left.  The next day we had lovely blue skies and I’m stuck inside writing a blog.  We do things the wrong way round sometimes.

Tomorrow we leave Port Lincoln and start our journey up the east side of the Eyre Peninsula.  Hopefully it is as good as the west side.  Apart from being so dry at the moment the trip so far has been very nice and we are seeing some pretty spectacular coastline.