Today’s walk was along what I now think is the best section of the Cape to Cape! The track has views of the Indian Ocean for most of its 15 km length and takes you past some of the iconic surf breaks that make the region famous for its surf: Umbilicals, Lefthanders, Cobblestones, South Point, Hussawooie, North Point and Guillotines. Even the unsurfed sections are spectacular intersections of ocean and land!
We got away, once again, just before 9am, leaving the homestead and heading north past Umbilicals were a couple of people were out. We could see Lefthanders carpark after only 20 minutes and made good time on mostly good tracks past Lefthanders to the carpark, doing the 4km in just under an hour. We had plenty of time today so we sat and watched the beach for a while at one of the memorials to surfers taken by sharks.
From Lefthanders it was a short walk past Cobblestones, reaching South Point just over 2km later and from there a short walk to Gracie’s Store where we had a pie, a coffee and some of the lunch we had been provided with. We had knocked the first 7km of the walk off fairly quickly so we changed our pick up time from 4pm to 3pm. After about a half an hour break we set off for North Point carpark, taking the road rather than scramble over rocks from the boat ramp – we were glad we did because there was plenty of rock scrambling in the section just after North Point before settling once again into good tracks for most of the journey to Guillotines.
We saw a heap of nice flowers in this section, crossed three brooks, saw a seal on the rocks, several chicken hawks and two small racehorse goannas!
Nearly 4km after leaving North Point Carpark, we reached the lookout and stairs down to Guillotines, where we stood for a while watching the ocean. Shortly after leaving Guillotines lookout the patch heads down to Cullens Beach for about 200m then heads straight up a set of stairs – a seemingly pointless diversion. Off the ridge we had been following all day. We reached a lookout just above Wilyabrup cliffs, 3km past Guillotines, at just before 2pm and took another break there before heading off the track to check out the cliffs. We were at our pickup spot, about 1km east of the track, by 2:35pm, completing a lovely day’s walk!
steelewalking 