St Francis Island: Chapter 1

So I get a call late on Friday – do I want to go shoot some stuff somewhere? We leave Monday. There’s no way I can do it with existing work commitments but then someone mentions birds and hello, what time do we leave? I’m in. Even though I have very little idea what I’m in for. But… birds!

Somehow the trip also involves teetotal me picking up a few cartons of wine from Bird In Hand Winery and I end up giving one of the winery owner’s kids a lift back to Adelaide to pick up his car and how the fuck did that just happen? But random is my specialty so whatever.

I speak briefly to Rod at EP Cruises to get the lowdown on what the tour is all about and we get a quick brief on what to bring and what to expect which I promptly ignore. I pack three times as much stuff as I’m supposed to but most of it is cameras/electronics which will come in super useful on a remote island with no electricity.

We drive to Ceduna in the Glam Adelaide car and not that I’m a bad driver or anything but Kelly the owner of Glam has to constantly remind me to not do anything weird or stupid because the car has ‘GLAM ADELAIDE’ written all over it in ten foot high gold reflective metallic lettering and everyone will know it’s us and she’s right because we’ve gone all of about 50 metres before people start messaging her saying they’ve seen us and will we be coming past Whyalla and no we won’t. Not that there’s anything wrong with Whyalla we’re just not going that way.

We stop at places like the Big Galah and the Concrete Crappa and despite me making smart arse comments about seeing the sights, being on the open road in regional South Australia is actually one of my favourite things. We stop in Port Augusta at the The Australian Arid Lands Botanical Gardens and have lunch – I always eat the same thing I always have – the Banjo Tuna Patties – and we walk around the gardens quickly and Kelly says she never even knew it was there and neither do lots of other people and now they do. It’s awesome. You should definitely go visit.

I pretend to drive across to the lookout but really I’m looking for white winged fairy wrens in the salt bush. We’re going quite slow and it’s at this point I realise the hybrid Rav4 from Northpoint Toyota we’re driving is basically the ultimate birding vehicle because when you’re going slow it’s so quiet I can’t even tell if it’s turned on or not, (spoiler alert: at one point I do in fact get out and walk away from the car only to be told I’ve left it on and fuck it’s quiet), and compared to my diesel where I wouldn’t hear a barking doberman two feet away, I can hear an ant at 100m. But no fairy wrens. Bugger.

We get some mango drink that the servo in Kimba is famous for and seriously, I’m so confused right now. They sell the usual roadhouse fare plus traditional Indian food like curries etc and although I can’t imagine smashing down a roadhouse curry driving across Australia maybe I’m just old fashioned. And did I mention how confused I was?

We eventually get to Ceduna, check in to the Ceduna Foreshore Hotel Motel where Kelly has a much better room than I do, and go for a walk on the jetty like old people. We then meet the people we’ll be going on tour with and I try to work out who’ll be the biggest pain the arse over the next four days and I’m not overly happy when I work out it’s me because everyone else is pretty ace.

The next morning we get on the boat and the sea is lovely and calm and it’s like when you go to a store where there’s an escalator to go down and entice you in, but there’s only stairs to get back out and fuck that sneaky strategy. Smooth seas on the way out lulls me into a false sense of security and it’s basically the last time the sea is flat for the foreseeable future.

We stop at Goat Island on the way out and fucked if I know why it’s called that because I didn’t see any goats but it probably sounded better than Bird Shit Island. I do however see my first White Bellied Sea Eagle of the trip and I am basically in heaven. It’s a bit gloomy and threatens to rain, but there’s only a few drops so it’s all good and the other people on the tour drink the first bottle of wine and both are a sign of things to come with both set to pour in copious amounts over the coming days.

Towards the end of the day we get to St Francis Island where we’ll be camping and have been there for all of about 45 seconds when we see our first snake. We can’t positively identify it but I know it’s not a brown, red belly black or tiger snake so it reassures me a little. The working theory is it’s a legless lizard and who the fuck comes up with these names anyway because you know what a lizard without any legs is? A fucking snake. It’s a snake. It’s like saying “oh, that’s not a rat, it’s a bat without wings”. So we see our first snake and it’s in with our camping gear and I basically resolve to not sleep for the next three nights.

The good news is it’s a full three or four minutes before we see our next snake and this time it’s a python. And fuck. me. there’s a lot of snakes on this island. Thankfully it’s quite brisk and the snake is in slow motion and also not deadly so I cope relatively well with the shit in my pants and distract myself by trying to take photos and not cry like a baby in front of the other guests. I take about 612 photos of which precisely three are in focus while the others are all blurry from my hands shaking so much.

We set up our swags, have dinner, and then go sit on the hill top to wait for the 500,000 shearwater birds we’ve been told will head back to roost at sunset. We see three. Possibly four. And everyone starts to suspect the video we saw of them from the previous week was CGI.

A few more bottles of wine meet their maker and everyone goes to sleep while I double, triple and quadruple check there are no snakes in my swag. I’ve never actually slept in a swag before and it’s surprisingly comfy and I have the best four minutes of sleep with one eye open I’ve ever had.

And so concludes Chapter 1.

YOU CAN READ CHAPTER TWO NOW.