We're now in Geraldton, having made the 5ish hour journey up the Saturday after my work Christmas party (hosted at a yacht club, in glorious sunshine... nice, just shame I still don't really know enough people well enough to truly relax with all the free bubbly...!), and went straight to Coronation beach a few km north of Gero town centre.
We'd heard about Coro (yes everything has to be abbreviated) but on arriving you can see the appeal straight away - apart from the fact there was the most amount of windsurfers and kite surfers I've seen out on the water in ages (about 20ish at a guess) it is a lovely sandy bay with waves on the outside that are mostly gentle and playful, not kit-breakers. Ideal for me and still fun for Phil.
We've now been here 5 days and have had a couple of really good days, and some pretty light wind days where I've decided to punish myself by learning to tack. I'm terrible at it, and it turns me into a furious monster as it is the most frustrating sport in the world, I'm sure of it! Phil puts up with my tantrums pretty well as I guess he's lucky to have a wife that windsurfs... although maybe he's thinking now that's less of a good thing?! Either way, we've both realised quite how unfit we are windsurf-wise, and Phil also has a long term on-off bicep injury, so we've managed to get on the water for about 3-4hrs max each day but that totally wipes us out!
Christmas Day itself was certainly different from the norm. Woke up to a present in a stocking (a lovely necklace from Phil), then had a big fat bacon and egg breakfast... so far so normal except for the fact the bacon was BBQ'd. Then we went and lay by the campsite pool reading our books and sweltering in the sun, cooling off (i.e. rinsing the sweat off) in the pool, then back to baking ourselves. Phil has decided he doesn't like the sun... this could be an issue in WA! We headed to Coro for the afternoon and the wind was pretty light so it was just me on the water whilst Phil read (in the shade of course) - he's obsessed with Ian Rankin at the moment. He provided coaching tips from the shallows as well, which were mostly well received. I'm still no pro at tacking though and I feel that being able to turn around out back without falling in is a fairly essential skill in light of the whole shark issue... (Mum - only joking). Christmas dinner was, true to every cliche going, shrimp and steak on the BBQ, with olives, gooey cheese (we have no fridge) and sparkling wine (which we used the camping shop's fridge for), followed by plenty of chocolate and some more red wine to top it off. Totally delicious, but turns out a bit too much for my seawater-rinsed, overly sun baked self, and I was sick at 3am due to over consumption. Whoops. All in all though, a lovely day, but obviously missing some key components - family to share it with. Unfortunately we don't have wifi here either so had to stick with just a phone call which was a shame.
It now looks like the forecast for the next few days is a not particularly comfortable combination of no wind, hot, with probable thunderstorms. We're now therefore working out what we can do nearby as we've already paid up for the campsite until 31st December.
Anyway, time to sign off, got some tourist activities to plan!
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