In Search of Red Dog

This morning was kicked off with many games of Yahtzee. While in Broome Lucy had insisted we borrow it for the remainder of the journey, which gives us an additional game to play and provides Lucy with a reason to make sure she comes and visits when she is next down in Bunbury (I think this is what people have in mind when they bandy around the term win-win around).
First stop, and the major part of the reason for continuing on past Karratha last night, is to find the memorial to Red Dog. This ended up being easier than we expected. On arriving in Dampier we stopped at the information bay to use the map of the town and found the memorial sitting in front of it. Max proceeded to photograph it from ever conceivable angle before we continued on into town. After driving around Max absolutely blew me away by deciding it was a town he quite liked and would happily live in. Given that this is only the second place that has received this level of approval (after Magnetic Island) to say it was unexpected would be an understatement. It does however prove that at this stage in his life cities hold very little attraction. I am wondering how much credit (blame) should be accredited to the movie ‘Red Dog’ however.
We finished our tour around Dampier by stopping at a shop to pick up a Red Dog postcard for Max to send back to his class. As we left the shopkeeper came racing out with three others that he wanted us to take as well??, which I thought was lovely and Max wasn’t too pleased about as he saw it as just more work. The best part was that they were all of different parts of the Pilbara, most that we will be visiting over the next week so Max is probably right, they will become more work for him.
Karratha was next on the list mainly because the Red Dog monument stated that full information on Red Dog was available at the Karratha Library. When we got there however we found it was closed for renovations so Max’s opinion of Karratha was certainly lower than that of Dampier. Karratha for me was just another town so we didn’t spend too much time there.

Wyndham from the lookout

We had already previously decided to head back to the Sherlock River campsite we had stayed Tuesday night at, so used the afternoon to visit Wyndham and Point Sampson. Wyndham was worth the visit just to look over what a real mining town, built by a mining company, looks like, while Point Sampson was interesting given the information we had found out the day before about it superseding Cossack as a port location.
Sadly, after the effort that has gone into the restoration of Cossack, which was absolutely marvellous, Point Sampson fell a little flat. We followed a sign to the ‘historic jetty’ but found a small section (about 15 metres) still remaining in a very dilapidated state and completely fenced off with 2 metre high cyclone fencing. Other than that some remaining rails and pylons could be seen around the water and that was it.
We therefore headed back up to camp, ready to try and catch up with Pete in Port Hedland tomorrow.