A trip to Flat Rock

Well this blog is named after the feeling you get after a swim in the sea, and late in the afternoon yesterday the overcast weather that has hung around Sydney since Christmas finally started to clear up and the temperature rose. So I threw a snorkel and mask and a towel into a backpack and headed down to the beach with Kate and Althea.

I've always been more of a snorkelling than stroke-swimming or body-surfing fan. Snorkelling is like a miniature, up-close underwater safari. There's something too about floating weightless, diving down and feeling the pressure on your lungs and sinuses, feeling yourself jogged by the ebb and flow of the current and watching it sway the seafloor around you.

The best place to go snorkelling in Sydney is Clovelly, a sort of giant rockpool formed when a fall of cliff rubble all but blocked off the entrance to an inlet about the size of two Olympic-sized swimming pools. But Flat Rock, the spot where the cliffs of the South Head peninsula crumble down to the sand of Bondi Beach, runs it a pretty close second.

[caption id="attachment_114" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="You can't get much closer to the beach than this"][/caption]

Even getting in is a ride. The tide swells here over a platform covered in weedy green and red algae, and aficionadoes can time their entries and exits perfectly so that the gentle waves carry them into and out of the deep water. When the water is too rough it's less fun - one friend once got dragged over the rocks and got cuts all over his feet which stopped him walking for a couple of days. Yesterday, though, was beautifully calm.

Once you drop off the edge of the rocks you find yourself hovering over a garden of waving, crinkly seaweed, in which more acute eyes than mine would be able to find leafy sea dragons. This falls away into a landscape of sand, punctuated by the odd rock, overgrown with weed and orbited by small fish. In the blue middle distance a school of silver trevally, each as long as my forearm, nosed their way out of the shallows off to the deeper water. Garfish twinkled past, jerking their needle-snouts from side to side. Closer to the waves, some of the boulders are coated with algae as pink as Miami stucco, and down between them you find the real action - crimson-banded wrasse popping in and out of shelter, dun herring cale inspecting their hunting grounds, and fortescue and rock cale squatting grumpily on the bottom.

I couldn't get pictures of any of this because my camera ain't waterproof, so here's some shots of the waves breaking at the base of the cliffs north of Flat Rock:

[caption id="attachment_111" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="A bit rough for swimming, this"][/caption]