Friday, December 11, 2009
Australia: Sunrise October 17, 2009
We got back to Sydney from New Zealand on Friday late afternoon. Jon picked us up at the airport on the southwest side of Sydney and we had to drive through Sydney to get north to Narabeen. Normally that is a one hour trip. This time it took a bit longer. We got to experience Sydney traffic gridlock up front and personal. It was fairly late when we picked Clarice up from her after workout session at the gym. Our task that evening was to unpack and repack to be ready to head back to the US on Sunday.
Saturday morning we were in the last full day that we were going to be in Australia. Clarice and Jon suggested that since they had not been to the Narabeen beach/rock pool for a sunrise yet that we should get up early and see one.
It was pretty brisk as we worked out way out to the rock pool (a rock pool is an area out from the beach where a breakwater is constructed of concrete and or rocks to create a relatively smooth swimming area). The water in the rock pool is sea water with the big wave knocked out.
The rock pool is right at the base of some fairly high cliffs that form a headland (north end of Narabeen Beach
Generally speaking the sky was clear with a huge cloud bank at the horizon. We had no idea what the sunrise would look like so we spread out onto several areas to try to get some nice photos from several perspectives.

The water went from rough and choppy looking to slick as glass in just a couple of minutes.




There were huge waves crashing at the breakwater that set up some pretty impressive blasts of water.


After a while this older bloke came down to the pool and started swimming laps. I guess if you do it every day you sort of get used to the temperatures.
We took a couple of we were here pictures and started to head out for breakfast.

I took a couple of shots at the beach where some guys were fishing.
Then Jon noticed what he was pretty sure was a spout of a whale out in the ocean.
So we boogied back to the stairs that lead up to the top of the headland cliffs in hopes of getting a shot of the whale from a higher point.
Once we got up there we found that there were at least four whales swimming around in a circle, probably feeding. The sun was just in the wrong place for me to take good pictures with our point and shoot camera, but Jon was able, with his camera, to get these.
This was the second time in less than a week where we had seen whales.


We also spotted a pod of dolphins swimming toward the south. We watched the whales and dolphins for quite a while and then head to the south in hopes of getting better shots of the dolphins as they moved on.

Still up on top of the headland cliffs we could see down the beach toward Narabeen. Clarice and Jon’s apartment is roughly in the middle of the picture back off of the beach a block and a half. On the beach were guys fishing and surfers getting ready to head out.
These surfers where just outside the breaking waves. It is a little hard to see, but in the left hand side of the picture above is a bit of splashing which was caused by the dolphins coming by to “play” with the surfers. It happened too fast for me to get a photo of it, but shortly after I took this shot the pod of dolphins all headed in toward shore, and rode the waves with the surfers as if to demonstrate how easy surfing actually is. It was pretty cool to see this wall of the wave with eight to ten dolphins streaming down its face mixed in with some of the surfers. The Dolphins only did it once and then they were gone.
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