After 2 nights in a great site with great views who wants to leave. I left about an hour before the others to locate a route through the sand dunes with a minimum of scrub bashing. The theory that always works in navigation is that multiple groups of people have done just about every bush walk beforehand so find out where they went. A taped trail was located joining the Stephens Bay dune system to the Noyhener Beach system. Even in this remote area the signs of previous parties are easy to pick up.
Backtracking to Stephens Bay I met up with Kerry, Mary, Julie and Greg and we made our way to Noyhener with ease and then were delighted to have a low tide to make the rocky beach section interesting. The cairn marking the inland route was located but the track appeared overgrown. In hindsight we should have disregarded this issue and pushed through as the group was led further around the rocks past a waterfall and tried pushing in to the track from here. Bad move as the scrub was extremely thick here and it took us more energy and time to locate the real track than was expected.
We plugged on to the highest point of the day on a hill shaped like a semi colon on the map about 200m high. There were a number of steep gullies needing to be crossed on the way but we loved the gully rainforest on these creeks and the water in the creeks is about the nicest around as it does not have the flavour of stagnated swamp water. Button grass plains sourced creeks all have this flavour which is not as nice as the tea tree and rainforest sourced creeks coming off steep hillsides etc.
There is a great view of Island Bay on the way down to Window Pane Bay (pictured) and we decided to use our rest day (next day) to explore this bay. Camping at Window Pane Bay was terrific. We were there two nights and had it to ourselves. Campers tend to gather rubbish off the beaches and make a pile at these camp sights with the vain hope that some day National Parks or Fisherman may try to clean them up with revenue raised from park passes or maybe because the government actually values these places. Perhaps the West Coast should be made into marine reserves in places like Island Bay as over fishing of abalone and lobsters according to locals are over-fished.
Saturday 9th January
Island Bay was explored but it did take some time locating a safe route down to the beach as sea cliffs make most descent points quite difficult. The low tide exploration of rock pools and exploration of pebbly beaches and sea caves in the quartzite made the half day trip an interesting and enjoyable experience. Lunch was enjoyed back at Window Pane Bay with Julie who explored the southern end of the bay in our absence crossing a couple of creeks. She had found a big abandoned fishing net at the end of the beach.
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