Sand patterns: Handkerchief Beach

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sand patterns

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Eurobodalla beaches: Handkerchief Beach

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Handkerchief Beach

If you head out from Potato Point, and drive down the coast highway between Sydney and Melbourne for about 20 km, you come to a turnoff onto a dirt road winding through the bush. You drive beside Nangudga Lake till you reach a car park and picnic area. If you cross the grass to the rippled sand, you can follow the lake, gleaming clear and crystomint green, to the rocks fanging at the outlet to the sea. Across the curling waves, Baranguba lies lounging and long on the horizon. Behind the beach the dunes are low and grassed and bushy.

I have a conversation with a fisherman, laconic as such conversations usually are.

Me: Any luck?

Him: One salmon.

Me: A good feed.

Him: Yum

A bit further along, I begin the same conversation with a woman on a deck chair, fishing rod between her knees.

Me: Any luck?

Her: I’m not really trying to catch anything. I’m just enjoying the sea and the sun. The rod’s just to please him. (indicating the salmon-catcher.)

I walk back down to the waterline and the hard sand. At the rocks, I encounter a conundrum. Where does a beach end? Usually the end is clearly marked by indubitable cliffage, and rocks that go under at high tide. At these rocks, the beach just seems to continue, but my beach bible (Beaches of Batemans Bay and the Eurobodalla Coast) calls the next stretch of sand to the north Nangudga Beach, which means I’ll need to return for another explore.

I head for the shade of the road, which is edged by casuarinas and banksias in yellow flower. Two sea eagles take off from a skeleton tree as I move towards them. When I return to the car, I find about twenty people picnicking in style, and two young Aboriginal men looking into the lake as if they had plans to catch something.

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How can I resist?

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Carters Beach, Eurobodalla

As my Polish grandson would say (in two-year-old's English) “Anudder one wooden bench”. OK, I know I swore off bench challenge, but this one confronted me as I approached the stairs down to Carters Beach near Narooma. So for two days in a row I'm joining in Heyjude's bench challenge, this time with a wooden memorial bench with a spectacular view. Behind the bench is a new planting on the denuded headland, and in front of it a view over blue sea and rolling waves to the north.

 

 

 

For more benches from around the world visit Jude's bench challenge: https://smallbluegreenwords.wordpress.com/bench-series/

 

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A wooden bench with a view

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Baranguba, Dalmeny Beach

For more benches from around the world visit Jude's bench challenge: https://smallbluegreenwords.wordpress.com/bench-series/

 

I don't often participate in challenges. I have enough obsessions to overcome, without adding another one. But when I saw this bench, at the end of March (wooden benches) and on the cusp of April (benches with a view) I decided I had no choice. It's perched on a headland on the south end of Dalmeny Beach in southern NSW, looking out over mown grass and coastal rosemary to Baranguba, a lighthouse island 7 kilometres away where there are colonies of seals and penguins and breeding grounds for shearwaters, seagulls and terns.

If you want to visit the island, join me at https://morselsandscraps3.wordpress.com/2014/10/07/to-the-island/

 

 

 

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Eurobodalla beaches: Yabbara Beach

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rockface patterns, Yabbara Beach

Yabbara Beach is the next beach north from Duesburys Beach. It’s about 25 kilometres from where I’ve lived for forty years, and this is my first visit. How I neglect what’s closest to me! Dog and dog-carer deposit me near a bus shed where a sign warns of rough surf, rips and currents and deep holes and gutters. These aren’t a threat to me because I never swim.

I cross the bicycle track, and walk across the undulating sand through low-lying dune wattle. Small humps of sand are topped by sprawling mauve beach flowers. Vegetation spills down the hill topped by twisted trunks. I head towards the rocky area at the south end, encouraged by Saturday’s photo-haul amongst the Duesburys rocks and eager to capture differences.

The tide is low and I walk through rocky outcrops on tongues of hard sand towards a chunky prominence, past a couple of individual rocks that could well be sculptures. My rough-ground leg-certainty is coming back to me: although this is very easy terrain, it’s a long time since I’ve rockhopped. My camera gobbles up rock patterns as I walk round below the headland cliffs onto Duesbury’s Beach, where a pack of surfers head out into the waves off the rocks and lounge around a beach tent. Half way along the beach is a very handsome black and white dog spurting sand up from the hole he’s digging, and chasing a ball down to the waterline.

This post is justified by a comment from Jude at https://smallbluegreenwords.wordpress.com/ As soon as she said she liked the textures in ‘Honeycomb, rock patterns ….’ I felt entitled to indulge my photo-obsession for such things.

A question for weird Jo at https://restlessjo.wordpress.com/ Can you spot the winged horse? Or a dog with a collar?

For Gilly at https://lucidgypsy.wordpress.com/ : more rocks with blue streaks.

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Honeycomb, rock patterns, rock pools and shells

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Duesburys Beach, rock face, rock pools, shells

Drawn by the need for a dog-walk, we returned to Duesbury’s Beach on a very different day with different cameras – my iPhone and my old 3 megapixel, genius at colour and closeups. I headed straight for the rocks at the south end of the beach and found a treasury of delights. The tide was low, the rocks were deeply honeycombed; rock pools sheltered shells and glimmered towards sea and sky; colonies of shells arranged themselves perfectly in rock crevices; rocks were striated with white, lined with quartz, ridged with sharp brown raised lines.

 

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Dog pleasures on the beach

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Cruz, dogs, Duesburys Beach

This very handsome dog is called Cruz, and he loves the beach – chasing balls, digging holes, racing around, and chatting up other dogs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A photo-walk on Potato Point beach

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Potato Point beach

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Corrugated iron 3

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cafe encounters, corrugated iron series, sculpture

Yesterday I was waiting for a friend in a Dalmeny cafe, overlooking the sea. As I perched on a stool relishing the feel of the air on my skin for the first time since I returned from the gelid north, my eyes were drawn to a group of women chatting animatedly. On their table was an irresistibly beautiful piece of corrugated iron, curving around its rust and paint.

As they were leaving, I asked if I could photograph it and discovered that the woman who found it, flotsam on the beach, used to sculpt in corrugated iron, bending it into bows or knots or peeling it into strips with hands whose strength has now gone, sometimes adding her own notations. Another woman in the group, a jewellery maker, planned to use this piece of dilapidated beauty to display her jewellery.

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Eurobodalla beaches: Duesbury’s Beach

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beach dog, Clarice Beckett, Duesburys Beach, rock face, shells

A few days after I returned from Warsaw, the walking needs of our son’s dog, currently in J’s care while said son is visiting a mate in Panama, took us to a beach I’d never set foot on before. I’ve passed it many times, driving the coast road to Narooma. It’s a rare beach where you can walk dogs all day every day. So we put the hair-shedding canine in the car late on a dull Sunday.

Duesbury’s Beach is contained by low rocky headlands, composed of 450 million-year-old, tilted metamorphic rock. Although the road runs right beside the ocean, it disappears once you’re on the beach, and you can only see the backing of bush, unseasonally luxuriant eucalypt green in the aftermath of a wet summer. There is also a bike track parallel to road and beach.

I’m not used to my beach walks being shaped by a dog. Like the twins, the dog is a bit much for me to walk on my own in my ageing feebleness, and his obedience level just about matches theirs. He loves chasing a ball, and he too has mischief in him: his favourite game is to run the ball down the beach into the ocean so it has to be plucked from the water by an obedient human. When another dog appears on the beach, our walk takes a 180 degree turn, so we put distance between him and his new desperately desired best friend.

The walk is short, but it gives me my beach legs and beach-urge again, albeit briefly. Barranguba reclines low on the skyline; ti trees lie at an acute angle on the cliff-top, their tops flattened by savage sea winds. I reprise favourite beach subjects: shells, rock patterns, foam, horizon. I’ve always had a liking for dull days when I’m out with the camera. In Night street, novelist Kristen Thornell writes in the imagined voice of Clarice Beckett, an Australian artist of mist and fog and early morning and dusk, praising what others see as poor weather: “the quiet sumptuosity and moody turbulence of greys … the lowered light of overcast skies … rain or fog making it easier to distinguish tonal differences … the bones of a landscape …a low twilight throb”. I don’t photograph with Beckett’s painting skill, but I recognise the perceptions.

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