On Sunday, 24 February, we spent the afternoon exploring Tuross Head, 50 km down the coast from Batemans Bay. It was a beautiful, hot day, but windy. Tuross Head is a headland with lakes on either side extending about 5 km inland. To the north is Coila Lake, which is blocked off at the ocean by a large sandbar, and Tuross Lake to the south, which empites into the ocean. The town itself it a quiet place; I wondered what people who lived there did for a living! It turns out that most of them are retired, and a lot I suppose work in Moryua, 10 minutes to the north. There were no business or industrial districts, a small shopping area, no schools, no churches, and a couple of restaurants down by the water. We didn't go to shop, however! We wandered around on the Coila Lake side for a while, the sand was beautiful, but the water was quite wild. There was a steepish slope down to the ocean, not like the gentle low-grade beaches closer to home. It was too windy to do much, so we went back to the car and drove higher up on the headland. There was a nice grassy park area up top where we stopped and had a nice picnic of tea, egg sandwiches, and cookies. The shore below was quite rocky so we went down to explore. Rachel did her usual thing and just sat on a big rock looking out to sea with the wind blowing her hair. John and Natalie did more exploring; Natalie really enjoys clambering around on the rocks and looking for rockpools. At the top of this park was a memorial to soldiers in the two world wars, nice with an Australian flag flapping in the wind.
On to the other side of the heads, and down to that beach we went.
Here is where we discovered our first jelly fish. There was a little girl who ran out of the water crying, and upon talking to her parents, we learned that she had been stung by a jellyfish, and we looked at the sand around us we and saw that there were dozens of these lying around! And here we were just casually strolling along in our bare feet, thongs in hand, with the odd wave lapping over our feet! The jellyfish here are not the deadly Box Jellyfish that are found further north in Queensland, but a type called Bluebottles, or Portuguese Man-o-War (due to their shape). They still impart a painful sting, though. They are much smaller that I though they would be, the body of the one in the picture is about 10 cm across, but the blue trim is a beautiful indigo colour. Their tentacles, however, can reach up to 10 metres! Check out http://www.australianfauna.com/bluebottlejellyfish.php
We went to Sunday mass down here in Tuross (this was how we determined that most of the population are retired - they were almost all grey-hairs at mass!) Then we went to O'Brien's Boatshed, down on the waterfront at Tuross Lake, for some fish and chips. This is one of the few places here that you can see a sunset over the water, since most of the waterfront faces east, but this little part of the lakefront faces west and we were sitting right down at the water's edge. Lovely end to a great day.
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