Gladstone, Shark Bay, Western Australia

Gladstone is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of place. Featuring nothing more than a couple of camp sites and a drop toilet, it’s a hot, festering, fly blown shit-hole during the day. At night time, Gladstone comes into it’s own. Sleeping under the stars in such a remote location is absolutely spectacular, and we were lucky enough to score moonless nights for the duration of our stay.

At sunrise, quite literally at the exact second that the sun peaks over the horizon, you get swamped by flies… thousands of the little black fuckers getting all up in your space. On our second day there we drove a 3hr, 180km round trip just to get a can of bug dead.

The only way to escape the black death is to hit the water and get as far from land as possible… even then the bastards still track you down. In two days of boating we saw three dugongs, an 8ft thresher shark, countless dolphins, shovel-nose rays and more snapper, cod and tuskfish than you can imagine.

These photos are taken 20km out to sea in Shark Bay… Living the dream with Cap’n Haddock in his home-made boat…