May Newsletter

Good evening members.

I write this, as I look out to a sinking sun over the water from our idyllic camping spot just south of Geralton in WA. Whenever I travel along the coast, I can’t help looking to see what is happening to beaches.

On the whole I am surprised that they appear in good shape but every now and then you come across pockets of obvious devastation. Recent examples in Victoria are Apollo Bay and Inverloch and so far in WA, a small place called Seabird, about 60 km Nth. of Perth which is a small settlement of 300 residents where a couple of houses had fallen into the sea. The community galvanized and eventually persuaded the Shire and State Govt. to spend $2m to construct a sea wall. First attempt was to place large concrete slabs on the dune face but these just all slid into the sea. The second attempt was to construct a wall that looked similar to ours on east beach near the surf club except that they have use limestone instead of our basalt. It was completed about 2 years ago and so far it seems to be doing the job. There are a lot of interesting photos on the web if you care to look up “Seabird”.

Why do localized areas suddenly get eroded by storms and others not? There is so much that is not understood and this is why it is so important to collect data.

Meanwhile on the home front, we completed another drone monitoring of East Beach without incident about a month ago and David Bills-Thompson has been working hard preparing a presentation on Beach Profiling for the Victorian Marine Coastal Forum.

Recently we have been having an interesting time with the beach monitoring measurements. There seems to be a discrepancy between our measurements using the laser and the drone measurements at posts 6 and 9. We have been doing both for precisely this reason. We haven’t checked the others yet. It could be the laser but it is something that needs to be sorted soon. Watch this space!

I had better get this letter off while I have WiFi. Nick Abbott