Monday, July 23, 2012

She Swells

The waters of the inlet have risen almost two foot from the rains ... past the high tide mark left by last year's sea kelp. Here are pictures of the inlet when we arrived in May:



 Spoonbills and snowy egrets fed from the tubeworm coral in May.

 
Above is the same tree (M. raphiolepsis, I think) now with her boots in the briny, one week ago.


 

Above, the long bay, where the kangaroos and emus tracked through the cracked mud to the other side, has filled with water and there is now bream to be found in there.


 All of the coral-encrusted logs and rocks have disappeared beneath the surface. Great, because we don't get bogged anymore - and slightly nerve wracking when they can't been seen anymore, while hurtling along in the tinny!

It must be a huge catchment to fill up the inlet like that - and the bar hasn't broken so it has nothing to do with the tides - just the mountains and all those storms, melting hailstones and a river that is running again.


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4 comments:

  1. Dr Mad FishJuly 23, 2012 at 2:57 PM

    Yes, the Koorabup River is swelling its banks here too. But even with all the studies and controversy it will be a westerly opening of the bar yet again. Nature doesn't do it on its own any more, hasn't for years.

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  2. sarah toaJuly 23, 2012 at 6:23 PM

    This one may get cut open again too, yet, if it continues to cut into the hill below the shack.

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  3. ciaranlJuly 25, 2012 at 12:25 AM

    Raphiolepsis is a hawthorn, according what I looked up anyway. It's striking nonetheless, standing all solitary there. Pallinup comes across to me, through these and other images you've posted, as a ghostly kind of place. Certainly eerie. It's the white stemmed trees on the shoreline. You said once before what they were, paperbarks maybe? The way they're packed, the trunks leaning slightly backwards and the canopies really dense, blanketing the light I'm sure, right across the forrest. Even the name Pallinup conjures something remote and inaccessible, something swampy and dark. A sinister sort of place, to my urban conditioning at least.

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  4. sarah toaJuly 26, 2012 at 8:32 PM

    Okay Ciaran, so it is a Meleluca raphio ... something.
    It can be a sinister kind of place. The sunshine wakes up the ghostly paperbarks on the edges of the water, against the black ranges. It's strange to be there when there are lonesome, shouting sorts or fugitives on the loose. At the moment the road has been washed out and almost inaccessible to two wheel drives, making it interesting for potential medical emergencies (a reality at times).
    The inlet is dark and beautiful, cold and addictive. Myth inducing, even.

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