It was a good thing the heat had broken by the time we got to Cowell because we discovered it does not have a beach. The bay is lined by mangroves without a grain of sand in sight. It is situated on a large bay with a very small opening, so again an ideal place for oyster farming. We went to the oyster sheds and sampled their wares - very nice.

As we were shucking our oysters in the camp kitchen we met another couple who were cooking up a big batch of blue swimmer crabs they had caught from their boat. We had planned to try for blue swimmers at Port Germein where we had caught them before. But we were told there were plenty here, and they could easily be caught off the jetty. As we spoke to this couple, we discovered they were from Port Germein and were here for a few days. They invited us to come along to the New Year's Eve celebration there, which we had been considering anyway. Now we had an official invite!

Cowell is a fair sized town with a wide main street and lots of interesting shops, including an antiques and collectables store. There were also two large pubs, one right on the foreshore. This pub had a pig on a spit on the night we arrived, so we booked in, and found half the caravan park there too. It was a great chance to socialise and get to know these people better.

It took us a while to realise that apart from the two pubs, there was no other places to eat. There was a bakery café which opened in the mornings, but was particularly uninspiring. There was also a fish café at the start of the pier which was very overpriced and not very pleasant, and also shut early. There were no pizza shops, fish and chips shops, take away food shops etc anywhere, except the BP roadhouse on the highway. A real business opportunity!

So we spent a couple of days crabbing off the long and curved jetty, and caught ourselves two big batches of crabs. These were cooked in the crab pot and installed in the fridge to cool - until we ran out of fridge space. Time to move on.

The next stop was a place called Lucky Bay, not far out of Cowell. This place had two claims to fame. Firstly, it was the distal end of the ferry which ran from Wallaroo on the Yorke Peninsula to this town on the Eyre, cutting off about 300 kms on the way between Adelaide and Port Lincoln. The problem was it was not running, and hadn't been for many months, and was not expected to until at least late 2018. There were all sorts of things going wrong and needing to be fixed. Might try it next time, if it ever gets going.

It's second claim to fame is that it is where people from Cowell go on holidays. Being on the coast on the other side of the point, it is not covered by mangroves and actually has a beach with sand.

Lucky Bay makes Port Neil look like an elegant beach suburb. Although the road into the ferry is paved, they really didn't bother past that. It is a collection of dingy shacks on a dusty dirt track, full of big 4x4 utes and boats. The only thing paved in the whole 'town' is the boat launching ramp.

GeorgeY's Bit

Cowell has a few roads with nice buildings. Shops are basic but adequate, yet it has the Black Stump. I had heard the expression "Beyond the black stump" years before I knew where Cowell was. The Black Stump is in Cowell and it started as a prank in the seventies. On a New Year's Day some funny blokes put it in the main street, then the town went with it and kept it. Later some other pranksters burned the original but a memorial was erected and kept.

Lucky Bay is named after the famous saying "Lucky no one knows we are here," which is also adopted as its design brief. It starts where the sealed road ends and is fringed with rusty cars and tractors and has the atmosphere of a junk yard. Lucky Bay displays fewer elements of grand designs than any refugee's camp in Somalia.

There seems to be a theme around this part of the Eyre Peninsula. Any decent town with some design and purpose has to be followed by a reminder of how things can go wrong.