Katherine Day 5

With Jayne not due back till tomorrow and John of early to work, we had the day to ourselves. I’d had a saw shoulder since our Ord River ordeal, so decided to drop Steve in Katherine (approx 30kms from John & Jayne’s) at the High Level Bridge and he’d paddle back to their house. I’d been instructed to hand our white towel from a branch indicating where he should stop. So I wandered into have an amazing 1 and a half hour remedial massage. Boy did I need that! I then went shopping for dinner and headed back home. On arrival, I grabbed all the dogs and started walking the 2kms to the river. I did try to leave Sam behind, as being mostly blind, she was going to be difficult to take. So she takes off in a different direction and I thought we were safely round the other side of the driveway to the river. Unbeknownst to me, the ground dropped away leaving a huge gap under it and little miss smarty Sam got under there. So I had a difficult 2km walk trying to keep Sam from knocking out was was left of her “good” eye in the barbed wire fences about dog eye level pretty much most of the way down to the river. I was a bit strung out once I’d reached the beach. Tango is just unstoppable and Midget is always searching for her next Wallaby to chase. We tried to sit for about half and hour and Steve hadn’t arrived. I walked back and started making dinner. John returned and ended up taking a further drive down. Being the ex Park Ranger that he is, he duly lit a fire, hung the towel and left a note and torch on the bank.

About 8:30pm, Steve walked through the door. He wasn’t sure how far he’d have to go, so kept stopping looking for people to ask. As John & Jayne are on 400 acre blocks, you can imagine that people to ask are few and far between! So Steve finally found a house that was near the river bank. He pulled his kayak up out of the way and then headed up to the house, hoping to get a lift back. There was no-one home. He then walked the 15kms or so back to John & Jayne’s. Being the usual Steve, he wasn’t wearing shoes and his legs hurt.

We turned in rather early after a nice curry.

Steve's pics follow. Following the wet each year, and larger than normal floods each year (the worst for a while was 1998 where Coles and most of the town was wet up to the tops of windows in all the shops) leaves many "loose" items to flow down the river. Steve saw fridges, car tyres and kayaks wrapped around trees. Most of which were some 10m or so above the water line!

saltwater croc trap. They use pigs heads as bait. The usually catch a couple each year. They seem to get back in after the wet. The freshies are supposedly in there, but Steve didnt see any.