This is the first time we had put up the camper for real, actually live home sleeping in it and all. We had put it up in the garden but we had taken best part of a day to do it, then to top it off some poles had jammed. Oh well, we boxed on and I rigged up stuff so it worked and made a list of things that needed fixing. happy new year 2018 video

The weather was really warm; it was over 25 C and we are the start of Winter. I talked to the camp owner about whether we expected rain. I was told they are forecasting it around the weekend about three days away but she said they had expected rain for over six months and nothing had happened.

In unpacking we released we had forgotten to put our camp chairs, this was going to making camping a little uncomfortable. Fortunately, we had a couple of boat cushions we used for the canoe and with those on top of ice boxes we had made do seats. No backs though. With the tent up, it was late so I cooked dinner and we retired early exhausted.

In the morning we got out on the canoe to lay our pots out for the red claw, we were not sure where to put the pots and previous experience told me to put them close to the banks and in the weed. The Red Claw are vegetarians, and so the bait in the pot is stuff like melons and veg scraps. Weird but that is the way it is.

That done we headed into town to see if we could find some cheap camp chairs, but no such luck. The town was too tiny, and they sold very little useful. Looks like we are sitting on iceboxes for the rest of our time.

The afternoon we check the pots, and bingo! We got three medium size little fresh water lobsters. Not enough for a meal but a start. We rebate the pots and put them back in at slightly different spots. We will leave them out overnight and check first thing in the morning. I popped the caught crustaceans into the freezer so we could put a dinner together with them.

The lake is a beautiful place to walk around and just spend time I spent a lot of downtime just reading, and some hours writing but my laptop ran out of battery and I my method of charging let me down. I have now fixed that.

We got fishing licences, but the weather turned and the wind got up so we didn’t feel like canoeing up the lake to fish. On the Thursday morning, we picked up a good number of Red Claw and before dinner we went out and picked up the pots again. The first three pots were empty, bummer. The third had about five in it and one as large as a small lobster. Perfect we had seventeen of these little guys. Enough to make a wonderful seafood topping for some steaks. Yummy and we are camping.

That night it bucketed down with rain and we were up during the night making sure our rig didn’t leak, it came through unscathed, however our canvas was soaked and we needed to dry it out before leaving. I paid for an extra night and we wandered up to the camp store to do this. When we got there, they informed there us there had been 40 mm of rain that night but where we lived back on the coast was a disaster zone. The radar showed huge rain storms followed by heavy rain and huge surf down the South East of Queensland. We had made the right decision to stay.

Saturday was fine but cold and we spent it in the car touring the area looking at other places to fish and put out Red claw Pots. It rained a lot the further east we went but the camp ground stayed pretty dry.

Sunday the weather was still cold but clear, so we packed up and headed home. Once we got home I checked the rain gauge and we had 120 mm in our garden which was three times the amount of rain we had at the camp grounds. The news was full of the huge storms that had devastated the eastern seaboard of Queensland and was smashing communities south to Sydney and eventually all the way to Tasmania. It was one of the biggest winter storms we had ever seen.

This was another lucky break.