Day 58 - Ord River Cruise

Day 58 - Thursday - 16/7/2026

Today we were picked up from our accommodation at 9AM by JJJ Tours who brought us to our boat where we met our captain Will and sailed off to collect some more passengers. 

Us at the boat

The start of the ride we went pretty fast but once we came to Maxwell Creek we started cruising a lot slower around 1 Cow Island, the reason 1 Cow Island got its name was because one wet season 1 cow got washed up onto the island and spent its rest of its days there. While cruising through Maxwell Creek we saw a few Jacanas, Darters and Cormorants.

Comb-crested Jacana

Just as we turned the corner, we saw a couple of White-bellied Sea-eagles in their nest. 

White-bellied Sea-eagle

Now we were starting to get into the gorge county and were surrounded by huge sandstone hills and that's when we saw a Western Short-eared Rock-wallaby in a shady horizontal crack between the sandstone, Will said they were very short sighted and mainly come out at night as they are prey for larger animals like Sea-eagles. 

Short-eared Rock-wallaby

Further on the cruise we took a quick turn into Stonewall Creek where we saw some more of the same animals. Then we sailed to a nearby place where we got out of the boat ad had some lunch, there was a vast variety of food to choose from. Where we ate there was also a small waterfall with some fish at the bottom pool.

Eating lunch

Then we jumped back up onto the boat and sailed further upstream, now we had hit some rapids with shallow water and much faster currents because we were nearing the dam at Lake Argyle. This was also where we saw our first Freshwater Crocodile sunning itself on a rock. 

Freshwater croc

Just before we saw the croc we saw a small colony of noisy Flying Foxes.

Flying Foxes

As we flew upstream drifting around corners, we saw a few more crocs and finally the dam was in view. 

The dam

The high walls were made of rock and Will said it contained 10 thousand Giga Litres of water, but he said he had no idea what a Giga litre was, so he described it as the same amount of water as 21 Sydney Harbors. There were three large pipes with two of them smashing out extremely powerful and fast water out onto the river, Will said that somewhere between 10 to 20 Olympic sized swimming pools filled with water come out those pipes every second and that sounded like a LOT to me. Sadly, this was the end of our cruise so we got off the boat and hopped on the bus where the driver took us to the top of the dam where we could see 1% of Lake Argyle.

View from the top of the dam

We got back on the bus, and the driver drove us over to the Durack homestead where we learnt about the Duracks. 

The Durack homestead

There was the man who created the dam, a famous author who made the book "Kings In Grass Castles" and there was even a Durack who won and Olympic gold medal in the 100m Freestyle.  Then we got back on the but and drove back to the caravan park.