Surfing Waves

In Queensland and northern NSW, cyclone level winds and swell ( hurricane for Americans Typhoon for Asia ) and southern NSW it is classed as an east coast low.
This is the rain radar.
Every little coastal surf haven is up and probably every road to them is flooded. The drought has broken

I saw that during the forecast for the Fiji Pro contest

What's it like down your way Jaffa? I'm worried there will be no beaches left after this!

Have fun. Be careful.

http://www.coastalwatch.com/videos/1707 ... east-coast

Morning washing machine check up happening shortly, a night of huge rains, trees being blown down, usual stuff, the flood warnings for the lower half of NSW starting to come in.
Snakes coming out of hibernation and coming into houses, same for funnel web spiders.
Log fire, strong coffee. Riding it out.
Stand by for a later posting of photos..........

Jaffa's account of nature's behavior reminded me of this:

"Everything in Australia is trying to kill you"
https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation ... o-kill-you
#12 in the list shows a gorgeous wave!!

I think that wave is shipsterns down in Tasmania. it's evidence that surfers are not made like normal people. It's also a haunt of great whites, on top of the 30km boat ride to get there and a cliff climb

Jaffa there are some scary pics from narrabeen, looks like the entire beach is being washed away.

Narrabeen to Collaroy stretch is always under threat with a big NE swell. Our turn will come as the low moves south along the coast. We have had two tornadoes pass through the headland near Merimbula, interesting to see trees screwed off like celery sticks where the funnels touched down, not like normal wind broken trees.

The seas are not big yet but the washing machine surge is in effect.



I imagine swell will be bigger tomorrow will shoot again, unlikely but possibly no rain squalls while I shoot

Well, that was quite exciting...

We had over 200mm of rain and gale force winds, and there's trees down in my garden (big buggers too - I thought palm trees were supposed to withstand cyclone-strength winds?), and there was flooding at the bottom of the hill by the beach too.

As for the surf, it's currently about 12ft, but a total mess, and the water is just full of "stuff". Nobody out at the moment... but... the waves are forecast to stick around for a few days and the wind is forecast to stay offshore for the rest of the week, so good times ahead

DBB, good to see you survived. Getting rid of a palm tree will be a pain though - maybe you can carve out a canoe? Tuesday/Wed could be good and then the swell looks like disappearing (at least down this way). Hopefully the banks arent trashed; its always hard to tell whether a huge swell will create or destroy them - all the sand is taken from the beaches, does it end up in banks?

Yes the sand eroded can create great banks particularly if the swell is angled correctly.
The good ones can be obliterated, mixed blessings, you also get to surf with the new driftwood and among the drowned sheep and cow carcasses! of course with what eats them?

Speaking of that, this is what's happened to my local recently after we had some 10m stormy swell here a few weeks ago. That is not a typo, 10m!!

The beach is completely wrecked. It's just littered with soo many rocks!
And the rip is massive. I got stuck in it about 2 months ago and put pulled round the coast to the next beach.

I hope everything is ok with you guys, looks pretty bad with flooding and storms!

Oh alright, I'll stop complaining about the trees that were blown down in my garden...




That was in Collaroy on Sydney's northern beaches.

It's interesting because Collaroy is known as the spot that you can go and surf when it's huge because it cuts the swell size in half... usually... but not this time.

My local beach barrel on the NE side of the headland.

When you hit the rocks

All my friends back in aus were dumbfounded by the coastal erosion, such crazy stuff. A lot of harbour beaches had surf too. One of my old swim captains (he was in year 12 when I was in year 7) had a house right on Narra overlooking the sand. I wonder what happened to his place :/

drowningbitbybit wrote:It's interesting because Collaroy is known as the spot that you can go and surf when it's huge because it cuts the swell size in half... usually... but not this time.

Collaroy cuts down swell coming from the south (where most big storms and swells come from in Syd) because it is shadowed by Long Reef. The swell was especially destructive because it was very strong out of the north east, so no swell protection.

There was a contest run while the storm was happening in Manly. Looked so gross..

Not too sure how to embed vids on my phone, but check out the footage;