Ledge Point – Lancelin

Ledge point is a little over an hour north of Perth, a small community built around the cray fishing industry. Now a days most of the commercial cray fishing in the region happens out of Lancelin which is only about 14km north of Ledge Point, while ‘Ledge’ is more of a recreational holiday town.

 

In a small coastal town like this there’s only one way to launch your boat and that’s from the beach, and the easiest way to launch your boat is with a tractor.

It begins early in the morning as people start their tractors and drive through the town towing their boats down to the beach. Quite a surreal site watching the procession of tractors, all shapes and sizes towing the boats loaded with eager fishermen. It also makes for a rather congested beach, it seems that every second house must have a boat and everyone wants to be on the water.

The sand here varies quite a bit in different areas, above is one type of sand, while below I’ve blown up one small area of this image.

Common beach sand gets pretty interesting when you look this closely.

This is sand from a different section of beach.

The different types of seaweed on the beach are quite interesting.

The town has two types of houses, the old original shacks and then the newer almost mansion like holiday houses, this picture shows the contrast between both styles. This person was running a garage sale over the week I was here.

I was staying with some friends and they had a beautiful spot for me to park my home in the sunshine, it was perhaps 300m from the beach, on some nice grass. No need for plugging in here, plenty of sunshine and I’d put some water in my tanks before I left, so I was happy for a week.

Though it didn’t stay sunny the whole time, a couple of days before I left it came over quite dark and stormy late in the afternoon which made for some great photo opportunities.

Then the lightning started.

And the rain began pouring down, mostly just to the north of me and I had a great vantage point on the highest lookout hill just up the road from where I was staying.

I then had a thought. It’s pretty silly to be standing on the tallest hill for miles around while there’s a lightning storm going on. I headed back home for some dinner.

While I was staying in Ledge Point the staple food was fish and crayfish, the boys would go out every day to check the pots and they never came back empty handed.

Of course I did some shell grit collecting while I was staying there, not a lot to be found though and I ended up travelling quite a way up the coast trying to find some. Looks a bit boring, but there are a lot of small ones buried under the larger shells you can’t see, also I learnt a valuable lesson about shell collecting.

If you collect shells from IN the water rather than on the beach, you may get ones still alive, and if you leave the bag of shell grit in the sun for a few days it can really pong……