DiNo's Travels Around Australia - 2014/2015/16/17: Day 103 - Port Lambert, Cossack, Port Woolcott

Well we did experience rain last night, only 2 mm but the accompanying wind was strong enough to encourage us to take down our awning at 12.30am last night

Today, wind and all, we did a tour of Rio Tinto's Port Lambert iron ore facilities. The tour included a visit to the original port town of Cossack, now inhabited by a caretaker, and the area around the port.

Port Lambert is a huge development which is growing by the addition of four new berths and the facilities to service them. The process involves unloading the rail trucks by tipping them two at a time without disconnecting them, stacking the ore on stockpiles, 24 of them, recovering the ore from the piles by bucket wheel reclaimers, transferring the recovered ore to ships and loading them. There are four berths in operation with a further four to be operational by early next year.

Cossack is the site of the original port for this area to the west of Port Lambert. There are three or four remaining substantial stone buildings but even they have been ravaged by cyclones, as has indeed most of this area. The Pilbara region is cyclone prone.

The headland out from Cossack is Readers Headland. The lookout there provided a 360 degree view of the Harding River, Cossack, Settlers Beach, the nicest beach in the area, Point Samson, Port Lambert and Wickham, in that order.

We went over to the other side of Cape Lambert to Port Woolcott which is the site of the area's yacht club. It was on the leeward side of the Cape and the absence of the strong wind which haunted us all day was a welcome relief.