25 June 2024
Nicole and I had booked ourselves on a fly, boat and drive tour of the Horizontal Falls and Dampier Peninsula. All these tours are super popular, this being the main reason we stayed so long in Broome i.e. to mark time until the first tour we could get ourselves on to (22 June).
The tour started with being picked up at the caravan park at 5:15am (yawn!) and getting dropped back at 5:45pm — a very long day.
The first leg was a flight from Broome airport to the Horizontal Falls on a seaplane, where I was lucky enough to be allocated the copilot seat. Awesome!
We landed and “taxied” to the very impressive pontoon they have set up there semi-permanently; they have to dismantle and move it to a safer place for the wet season (see below for more details).
Then it was on to our boat (with 900 horsepower of outboard motors on the back!) for a short trip into Cyclone Creek, so named as this is a safe haven where people take their watercraft when cyclones are approaching and during the wet season — including the tour operator.
Next, a cooked breakfast on the upper deck of the luxury houseboat that was the home base pontoon, followed by a feeding session of wild fish, several Tawny Nurse Sharks, and a Lemon Shark. Interesting.
Then a boat trip to circumnavigate Slug Island, so named because its footprint looks like a slug (go figure).
After morning tea (muffins!) it was time for the main event — the Horizontal Falls. There are two openings into otherwise cut off areas of the bay where up to 11 metre tides — the second largest tides in the world after Nova Scotia — flow through. This means absolutely massive volumes of water passing through a gap only around 20 metres wide. David Attenborough upon filming them suggested they were they were indeed thew Eigth Wonder of the Natural World. After seeing them, we can see why — absolutely breathtaking!
The boat we were on made its first pass through the Falls at impressive pace, this being the “downhill run”. So much fun! We didn’t pass through the second Falls as there was an accident there in 2022, and so the operator is no longer allowed to traverse this one. In fact, nobody will be allowed to go through either one from 2028, so if you want to experience this, you’d better do it soon.
After recovering from the Horizontal Falls, it was back on the seaplane for a flight to the tip of Cape Leveque (where Nicole and I had visited before arriving in Broome) with great views of Talbot Bay and the Buccaneer Archipelago along the way. We saw many signs of the massive tide movements that occur there, with churning water where it logically shouldn’t be.
Upon landing, we were driven to the Trochus Hatchery and Aquaculture Centre, run and managed by the local indigenous community. Here they take in fish and other marine life needing some help to rehabilitate, plus beautifully polish up and sell Trochus shells. And yes, Nicole bought one.
Finally, we visited the Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm where we had a lovely Barramundi lunch, followed by a tour of the history and operation of the pearl farm. I won’t go into all the details, suffice to say it was very interesting. At the tour’s conclusion we were shown their most expensive piece of jewellery — a pearl necklace worth $330,000! And no, Nicole didn’t buy it.
Then it was a very, very long two-hour bus trip back to our caravan park. A long, but extremely interesting and enjoyable day.
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