At the bottom tip of the Eyre Peninsula, on the eastern side, is Port Lincoln. This is the home of Australia's largest fishing fleet, and the source of most of the tuna caught here, as well as many other types of seafood. Hence it has the largest number of millionaires per capita of any town in Australia. And although Port Lincoln itself is quite beautiful, when these millionaires want to go away for the weekend they usually go to Coffin Bay.

Coffin Bay is also at the tip of the Eyre Peninsula but on the west side, so it is only about half an hour away. It has a large bay with a small opening to the sea, so the currents coming down the west coast carrying plankton get caught in here, and it makes a great environment for oysters. Coffin Bay oysters are famous around the world due to the clean water and the rich nutritional environment. And they taste great too.

The town itself is small with a caravan park, a couple of small take away food shops, a pub, and a general store. However there is also a large marina with many fancy yachts parked, as well as a yacht club and another sports club. Problem is these are only open on weekends - to cater for the visitors from Port Lincoln. During the week the only decent place for a feed is the pub, and a very expensive restaurant on the foreshore. It really does not cater for the general holiday maker or family.

Despite this, we enjoyed a couple of days in this pretty little town. The first day was still very windy and we had a wild thunderstorm that night, but the next day we woke to blue skies and a much calmer day. We did an oyster tour in the morning where we had to don huge wading suits and make our way to a small pontoon on the water. There we were informed all about the oyster industry and shown how to shuck oysters properly. Got to taste a few too. There were a few waves on the way back, and I got thoroughly soaked, despite the suit.

That afternoon we did a tour of the oyster sheds where they showed us how the oysters are processed and prepared for export. Got to taste a few more. Heaven.

We then moved on to Port Lincoln. This felt like the big smoke after the towns we had been in recently. It has a Coles and a Woolies, as well as many shops and cafés on a very nice foreshore. There is a jetty on the town beach, again with a swimming enclosure (sharks are a big problem here.) There is also a very large wharf and some huge silos where the wheat from all the local wheat farms is shipped out. As well as this, a little further south there is a large marina. This has three sections - one for the tuna boat fleet, one for the other fishing boats (prawns, mussel, abalone, other fish), and the third for pleasure craft - some fancy yachts indeed. The houses here are very swish and elegant, most opening onto estuaries where the yachts are parked.

We did a tour to explore the rest of the area, which was good because most of it was off-road and we would never have done it ourselves. There is a national park just out of Port Lincoln, and another just out of Coffin Bay. They are like two ears poking out on either side of the point that forms the very bottom of the Eyre Peninsula. Problem is they are mostly traversed by very rough dirt tracks. The tour took us all over the Lincoln National Park and the very point of the peninsula, with some spectacular views of cliffs and wild oceans. At one point there is a seal colony on the rocks, but we could only see them from very high up. Our tour guide had a great camera and got some amazing shots of them from that distance. There was also a sheep station that happened to have a large number of gum trees. Thirty of forty years ago they imported a few koalas and they loved it. There is now a colony of hundreds of koalas in the wild, but happy for people to come and get up close. We then went on to sample a seafood lunch at a local restaurant, and topped it off with a stop at a winery and an animal park.

Port Lincoln is a very large and deep port with two arms of land extending out each side, and a long flat island across the middle part. This makes for very calm waters in the bay, so many large ships are very happy to come here. There is a big push to entice more cruise ships in to give the tourism industry a push.

GeorgeY's Bit

In 1802 Matthew Flinders explored the coast from the west to establish if Australia is one piece, or several small islands. He navigated the "Investigator" and mapped the shoreline and turned into each bay looking for fresh water. He named the bays as he went; Smoky Bay was named after fire by local natives, Streaky Bay because it looked streaky with seaweed, Coffin Bay after a friend of Matthew, and Lincoln after Lincolnshire, Matthew's hometown. Since then Port Lincoln evolved to become the world's seafood capital and "Tunarama" is their big celebration weekend in January each year. Fishing, aquaculture and grain export are traditional industries here, but tourism seems to be hard to establish. Shark cage diving is attracting thrill seekers worldwide but for the average tourist Port Lincoln is too far and hard to reach. Being far from any capital city in Australia and the world can be both an advantage and a challenge. More cruise ships started noticing Port Lincoln and are bringing in visitors, but something is missing. Australia's most iconic tourist places are weird looking rocks with some wild imagination in the naming act. The "Twelve Apostles" are not 12 and do not look apostolic, yet they established themselves as the thing to do on the "Great Ocean Road". When Flinders named the places he discovered he was thirsty, and tourism was not on his mind. Port Lincoln needs to do more in giving inspiring names to rocks and features there, rather than tell the story of Flinders coming with random names to bays. The other obstacle that prevents Port Lincoln using its distinct advantage is a nanny state law that dictates that all fish caught is to be frozen and processed and truck loaded to fish markets, domestic and overseas. So unless you are a wholesaler you can watch all this fish transferred on the wharves, but you cannot touch. If I cannot get a fresh tuna from Port Lincoln marina, then I will get it laminated in plastic from Aldi and save the travel, another missed opportunity for tourism. Now that we have established that if you want a freshly caught fish you have to catch it yourself, I can understand the dominance of fishing programs on television for the lucrative, ever growing fishing gear retail market.