Stormy day in Bondi

Yesterday I went to my last swimming class (it went well; I can now swim 500m non-stop without getting out of breath, and I can breathe while doing freestyle without coughing up a litre of brine, a length of kelp and a discarded six-pack holder). The class was a replacement for a cancelled class two weeks ago, when Bondi Icebergs had been closed because of THIS.

Maybe that photo looks no more than normally rough and stormy. But a couple of things to add context: the spray in the middle of the picture is blowing just short of 100ft into the air; it's blowing up at pretty much the point where I was standing when I took these photos; and the water was flowing to and from the beach at such speed that the few people who tried to paddle were being swept off their feet and along the beach like dead cows in a flood.

There were a handful of surfers out there, but they were just bobbing around trying not to get swept onto the rocks; no one was able to stand upright, although a friend who was at Bronte beach on the same day told me that its much cleaner waves were attracting lots of eastern suburbs surfies who were successfully standing and riding them.

Bondi does get some amazing storms from time to time. In John Birmingham's "biography" of Sydney, Leviathan, there's a description of an even scarier sea on a similarly blazing beautiful day; he also points out that Flat Rock itself, the resilient 235-tonne boulder sticking out of the surf in the above photo, was actually blown up onto the rock shelf in a particularly brutal storm in the early years of the 20th century.

Still not impressed? Well, the waves didn't just break against Flat Rock: