February 28 - Shipwrecks

Lyle and I are back in Australia. We have been here for a few days now and I must admit that the weather is close to perfect. As I am writing this, we have just returned from our daily walk along the beach.  I love these beach walks, not only for the obvious reason of salty fresh air and warm sunshine, but also for the fact that I can usually walk without using my cane.  With bare feet, I can feel the firm sand left by the outgoing tide. Still, I don’t think that I would try the “no cane” thing unless I had someone with me. The constant tides leave changes on the shoreline that vary from one day to the next.

The past few days have been typical of this. On our early morning walk, we discovered multiple lumps of what appeared to be coral or broken reef. Some of the greyish white lumps were the size of my fist and in other places they were scattered like pebbles. I walked very gingerly indeed.

Lyle and I haven’t positively identified this new debris on the sand but we suspect that it might have broken off from one of the shipwrecks that lie off this part of the coastline between Newcastle and Sydney. Over the years there have been over one hundred wrecks, with the earliest one recorded in 1852 and the most recent in 1951. Some of these underwater ghosts are a tourist attraction for divers but for the average tourist like me, the wrecks remain unobtrusive and anonymous.

The Great Barrier Reef doesn’t extend to this part of New South Wales, but there are still parts of the coastline where it is possible to imagine ships running aground.  Following are two pictures taken near Wamberal Beach which on the Central Coast a hundred kilometres north of Sydney.  This is the closest beach to where we are staying.

The first picture is of a rocky outcrop near the end of our beach walk.  The second picture shows me standing on the rocks.

Beach close to Wamberal Beach

Sue on rocks