It’s lovely to take a day off during the warmer months and spend it driving up and back to Lakes Entrance (Gippsland). Because of the awful fence they have now built down the middle of the road between Sale and Bairnsdale we always take the Sale by-pass then when we hit the highway again we go straight ahead via Bengwarden to Bairnsdale to avoid it – a much more pleasant drive indeed. There are many spots you can drop off to look at the scenery along the way (Roseneath, Wadi Point, the Sand Jetties etc). If you drop down to the water at Johnsonville there is a fine place for a picnic with toilets and even a shower. ‘Free’ campers take note.
A refreshing walk across the bridge at Lakes to look at the beach and study the bird-life is just about de rigeur but mostly we go up so we can buy a heap of fresh school prawns from the fishing boat there. They usually cost around $25 a kilo but they are the very best prawns you have never eaten. We always buy a few kilos so we can have a few really good feeds over the next few months. Somehow we never buy enough and always run our before the next summer! Della and I managed to eat a whole kilo between us for tea!
They are so much more delicious than the ‘cardboard’ prawns you are used to eating from the supermarket or fish shop. They take my mind back to when I was a small boy growing up around the shores of Lake Macquarie NSW nearly 70 years ago.
On balmy summer nights I remember going out in the moonlight trawling for ‘greasyback’ prawns in the shallows with a purse-net strung between two tomato stakes in the tepid water with my father, Lawrence and his brother Ken – both now gone over fifty years ago. We would boil them (lightly) up in an empty 60 lb honey tin over a driftwood fire and devour them (with a billy tea accompaniment) until we were utterly and delightfully replete, and then fall asleep on the seagrass along the foreshore – all houses now of course, but you can still do this sort of thing in the less developed spots around the Gippsland Lakes which hopefully will never be spoiled as those beautiful lakes along the NSW Central Coast have been.
Blue crane.
View North along the beach.
Sea Wrack.
View South along the beach.
Plenty of fish in the lake.
Two different gulls.
Two male swans (cobs) disagreeing.
My plate of prawns for tea.
