Rockingham - Penguin Island

Cheerio friends and strangers,

It is Sunday and that means my day off! WUHU! And this time I took the second car of my host family to drive to Rockingham. After I cleaned the back window and got the satnav running I set off to this 50 km journey along the Kwinana Freeway. I arrived at 9:45am at the ferry departure point where I got a ticket to set over to Penguin Island. It is literally a 5 minute drive across and we even saw two people walk over the sand bank. But it is considered dangerous and people even lost their lives due to the strong currents.

 

Anyway, as we arrived most of the passengers immediately went into the Penguin Discovery Center as the first feeding of the day was about to start at 10:30am. The caretaker told us a lot about Little Penguins (I have already seen them in Melbourne St. Kilda ) and the ten penguins put on a little show. There are about 1000 wild penguins on the island but they are very shy and come ashore normally at night.

Then I wandered around the island which is really small. The whole circuit around the island didn’t took me an hour although I stopped everywhere to take pictures and read the signs. So at 11:45am I sat in front of the Discovery Center to eat my lunch which I brought with me (there are no shops on Penguin Island). Then I walked along the island in the shallow crystal-clear water past some caves. I didn’t find anything except some snails and empty caves.

 

Then I went back into the Discovery Center for the second feeding. This time it was really crowded and another caretaker gave the commentary.

 

She said that apparently a sea lion has arrived today at the island (there is a seal island close-by where the rare Australian sea lions come ashore. I already saw them on Kangaroo Island ). So I left the feeding very early and took another round over the island, this time much quicker but I didn’t see any sea lions :-(

A little bit disappointed I took the ferry back to the mainland at 1:10pm. I ate some snacks before I set the satnav for my next stop: Mandurah!

Yours Penguin-island-visiting Stefanie