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Hi all,
I'd agree that maybe 18,000 were there, although I think a fair proportion of those there weren't there for the eclipse and many didn't even know that there was one on. It was school holidays, plus just after Easter and just before ANZAC Day, so I think that there would have been plenty of people of there anyway for the beaches, snorkling and fishing.
But many people were spread out over a fairly wide area. There's about 20 campgrounds in the national park, most within about 100 m of the beach, with between about 10 and 30 campsites at each place, so there would have been a couple of thousand just at the NP campsites. My partner and I stayed in town at a nice resort while the two teenage kids stayed at one of the NP campgrounds and went snorking every day. But I pity the poor folk that were at the town council campsite with a few thousand people crammed into a bare, dry, dust-bowl of a paddock with a few porta-loos on the outskirts of town.
One of the main lessons from this exercise is to book accommodation and flights etc at least 12 months in advance, preferably more.
Another lesson is to do a few dry runs at home with ALL the gear to make sure everything is up and running and automate as much as possible - use a timer etc to take lots of photos, so you can look at the eclipse and what's going on rather than having to fiddle with gear and take photos manually. I took 2 DSLR cameras - next time I'd take 3+.
And have back-up plans for where you want to observe in case the police state in which you live or visit wants to coral you into a fee-paying fenced compound.
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