Solo HiAce. The Sharks at Shark Bay @4xoverland

Well good morning, I've woken up to another absolutely frigid freezing wind. Again like yesterday it will abate at around midday and become absolutely glorious. But I'm driving further north now to a place called Francois Perron National Park. I've been there once before. I don't think getting off the sand is going to be particularly difficult this morning. It's temperatures cold so the sand will be firmer and I can't see myself having a difficulty. If I do I will turn the camera on but I will see you on the way. You find me on the second part of a solo trip I took not too far from my home. I of course live in Perth, Western Australia and I've come out here to create a new course for my ASPW experience community called Solo Expeditions, a unique way to disconnect. And you find me on day four and I'm heading north. I've decided not to head to Francois Perron National Park. The reason being is there is so much holiday traffic on the road that the chances of me, if I arrive there at three in the afternoon, getting a spot to camp are very low indeed. I'm about 200 kilometers from Francois Perron which if I get up early dinner, arrive there before midday, I've got a much better chance of finding a camping spot. And so I've taken a track off the main road or a place to camp the night. A bush camp but I need to find a clearing at the moment. There are fences both sides of the road. Hopefully I'll find a track off into the wilderness somewhere and park up for the night. But not having a lot of fuel in my tanks, I can't really go far to look. And as it happened, I couldn't find anywhere. The bush was just too thick. So I went to Plan A but with a proviso, not going to the most popular national park, going to somewhere else. I'd never been to instead. The rules at the place I wanted to camp at have changed. You have to book ahead. There were no places available as I suspected. So I have chosen a different campsite called Goulette Bay. Goulet, Goulet, Goulet Bay. I'm not pretentious so we'll call it Goulet. Pretentious? What? It's called Goulet Bluff so that doesn't mean that it's on the water. It probably means it's on a hill overlooking the water. My campsite was the only one available called Campsite 1. And well, this looks like... Is this... Yes, this is it. Campsite 1. Yes, now I can see why... Well, this is Campsite 1. And it's miles away from everything. That's horrible. That's a horrible campsite. There are only four campsites here. They're all booked. Given that there are four designated campsites and only two people already here, I'm going to take a chance that there's another campsite closer to the coastline. And if nobody pitches up to take that one, then I'll stay there. No fires are permitted anyway, but this is pretty. That's pretty level. And a low-impact camp with no fire. I can't see a problem. It's a pretty place. Ground is very, very soft here. I can see fish swimming in the water. Fins sticking out. Fish feeding in the shallows. Quite big too. These are nervous shark, a species of requiem shark, so named because of its timid behaviour with regard to humans. Although they don't seem too concerned about my presence here. There's a ray there on the water down there. Can you see the ray? They occur all the way up to the northern parts of Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. And diagnostic features include a short blunt snout, oval eyes and a relatively large second dorsal fin. The leading margins of most fins are finely edged with black. And that's what I can see here. And the lower caudal fin lobe is black-tipped. Shark Bay is named. Because of the large numbers of sharks in the area. Sharks everywhere. That's a truly beautiful place. I'm having fun this evening. These are the two cameras I'm shooting stills with. This is the Leica R5 with 35mm lens. R3, big pardon, R3. And then that's the Hasselblad X2D with a 75mm lens and also a 28mm lens. Comparing film with video format. Before we crack on, you've probably noticed that recently many YouTubers are going the product route. This is my reassurance to you. I will never go that route. I've never done paid advertorials. Will not do paid advertorials. But that does mean that I have to finance my shows, bills and expeditions by a community. And the community is now all in one. ASPWExperience.com. All my work. That's all of Overland Workshop. All of my storytelling, videography and cinematography, teaching and lectures. My community. Everything in one place. ASPWExperience. Give it a thought. It's five dollars a month. That's all. And I intend to be around for quite a while longer. What do you reckon about that? Need a little bit of a little less headroom. I have woken to absolute calm. This beautiful bay. Few people around enjoying its tranquility. I last night took a whole lot of still photographs using my Hasselblad camera and some of them are really gorgeous. I hope you will agree. Using the Tread 2 in a vehicle is wonderful because of the attention they have paid to the mount. Clipping it onto the dashboard and taking it off again and working on and clipping it back is effortless. Literally effortless. So what I want to do is I want to look at my map and I'm going to a campsite now. It's kind of heading south on my way home and there's a particular campsite on my way home. It's not exactly on the route but close enough that I can navigate to. So I need to find it on my map. All my waypoints that I transferred from my Garmin Overlander are here and so I can find it. Here it is. Nice. Let me show it to you. Nice camp lake edge. Can you see that there? Nice camp lake edge. So that's what I'm going to... So I'm going to just touch it, touch the waypoint and say go and it's going to... It's telling me it's 12 hours and 41 minutes. That's not the case at all. But anyway, see there you go. It's now clipped into place. I need to do nothing else. And the clamp has a lock so if you're using it on a craft that is moving around like a boat or something, it's not a dedicated marine GPS this one but on a motorcycle or IETV or something like this, off-roader, it really does the job extremely well. I'm heading now to a campsite that I've been several times. It's kind of on my way home, not exactly but close enough. I'm going to head there. It's about five hours today and I'm going to camp the night on my way home and my last night solo will be tonight in a favourite place that I love to go camping. I just hope the flies aren't too bad because they can get a bit bad but it is still the heart of winter so they shouldn't be bad. It's been a really long day. I've enjoyed the drive so much but I thought I would be in this area about an hour back. It's taken longer. There's a trouble with navigating on all of these back roads. Difficult to get an accurate time stamp on where you're going to be at one time so not ideal but I'm expecting 20 minutes or so. I'll be at my camp. It is 20 past five so I will arrive probably just a little after sunset. I'm actually thinking I'm going to camp here instead. Why not go somewhere new? Could be really nice photographs in the morning with early morning light. I could camp anywhere. Camping is allowed here. I know that. All these wild flowers. It's amazing. I'm going to camp here. Let's have a look around. I feel very lucky. On the way to the place that I know discovered this abandoned farmhouse. It was beautiful. I arrived a little bit too late for the magic shots. I did get a few but look at the flowers. The whole of Carrara rangeland is covered. I've been driving through flowers almost the entire day so first thing in the morning before sun up I'll come and photograph the flowers and photograph this abandoned farmhouse. There are a lot of farms and stations around here that are abandoned and most of them are a complete wreck. Just piles of corrugated iron. This one has obviously been fixed up a bit. Nobody lives here. There's a little sign there. I noticed a little welcome. Camping. No fees while camping. I've looked around. I've seen one place where somebody has built a fire but nothing else. So it's obviously not a popular place. Butcherbird. Isn't it amazing? How often. Uncanny. This is my last camp. The butcherbird starts calling. I reckon tomorrow morning they'll be going full tilt. It gets very vocal in the morning. I can't leave the camera running all day hoping he will call but I think he might. Tomorrow morning. And I was right. They started calling quite early. So in my zest to get the beautiful soundtrack I grabbed my stereo microphone plugged it into the camera and it stopped working. It doesn't work. It's broken. I'm so sorry. But I had an absolutely brilliant morning taking pictures. What am I taking away from this trip? For me. It's given me a kind of a new lease on life. Sorry for the cliche. I have to fall back on them every now and again. Because I enjoyed myself so much. Not this solo trip. The photography. Three of my campsites were just glorious. Just beautiful. And what I mean by glorious is a place where you look at the wonder of the planet the nature and everything about it. And I'm afraid for me it means being on my own. It just does. And I was completely on my own. I haven't seen a car in a couple hundred kilometers. My photography and camera equipment. I did mention this or on other videos that I'm changing my format to give it a more cinematic feel. Another cliche. But I'm upgrading my cameras to having been through the Leica experiment. It was really, really good for me. Because it's cemented in my mind that equipment is important of course to get it right for one's own workflow and creative output. But it wasn't the system. It was the way I was using it that was the problem. And amongst the best purchases of all has been that Hasselblad X2D. I love that. It is so rewarding to use as a still camera. And because again as I said before because it is a still camera and therefore when using it I mean my brain and creative thing is on still photography. Images to print and share images. Not video. They're very different. And so my still photography has got a lot better because of it. Because I'm now focused. When I'm doing stills I'm focused on stills. Not trying to do both at the same time because it never works. So now I have stills and I have video and they're separate. So I'm going to wrap this up now. Thank you very much for being with me on this trip. Right, which way am I going? I think I'm going right. I'm going to check my GPS. I've got traffic coming. I want to thank you all very, very much for watching. Same thing. Like, subscribe, etc. Tell YouTube that you like the videos and you want to see more of them. Looking forward to the next time. For now.