13 January 2012 - Menindee Lakes, shearing sheds and jumping fish

Today we packed up camp from Broken Hill and headed to Menindee to check out the lakes.
Overall very impressed with Broken Hill, it was definitely worth a visit and glad the weather stayed mild for our time there.
Menindee is about 110kms from Broken Hill and it took just over an hour to get there. We visited the Menindee Lake lookout before heading to Copi Hollow, a camp site that had been recommended to us.

The caravan park at  Copi Hollow was built by the Broken Hill Water Ski Club. Copi Hollow is between Lake Pamamaroo And Lake  Menindee and the whole lake system is about 98% full and more flood waters are on the way down from QLD. We are very lucky to be seeing the place pretty much at its best. The park was immaculate, water is not spared when it is available and the grass was better than most of the lawns in Sydney. We found a great spot right on the waters edge and set up camp. No other campers were in the park and overall the whole area was very quiet.
In the afternoon we headed over to the old Woolshed in Kinchega National Park. This was an unexpected find on our trip to date. The building has been left pretty much as it was in the early 1900's and you are free to roam around. National Parks have tried to keep as much of the old equipment as they could find and put it on display. Em and Lachie had a ball running through the hinged doors of the pens that were previously used to house sheep. Opening and closing doors is a mutually shared favourite past time and they ran amok. Fortunately there were no other visitors and we were at no risk of disturbing anyone.

After an hour or so of running through the woolshed, the kiddies were suitably tired to go an look at something else. The visitors book mentioned something about 'jumping fish' so we set out to see what that meant. The road leading to the woodshed is a raised levee bank between the Darling River and Emu Lake. Pipes under the road allowA water to flow through when the river is up. On the Emu Lake side, huge numbers of carp were following their instinct to swim upstream and the water coming through the pipes provided a man made cascade effect. The carp were launching themselves out of the water in a vain attempt to get further upstream but had absolutely no hope of clearing the 30m wide road. I have never seen anything like it and always thought carp were quite a sedentary fish. Some of the fish were huge, at least a couple of them were up to 1m long and jumping with the best of them. What an amazing site and probably not something seen very often particularly as Emu Lake is one of the first lakes in the system to dry up. The carp will need to make the most of the good times while they are there.
The woodshed and the jumping fish were one of the highlights of the trip to date. We had almost dismissed heading to the woolshed as we had read nothing about it and did not think it would amount to much.
After all the excitement we headed back to our campsite for the obligatory BBQ dinner and watched an amazing sunset from under the annex of the tent.