After an extremely dry, warm winter and early spring along Australia’s east coast, our beaches are doing something they haven’t done for years.
As the Australian surf monitoring site Swellnet reported this week, beaches are much wider than they were this time last year up and down Australia’s east coast, and especially in New South Wales, with huge stockpiles of sand extending much further than usual out to sea.
One reason it was so warm was because the winter storms – and the large swells that accompany them – never really materialised, tracking too far south to make their way up the east coast, where high pressure systems and fine weather dominated.
“Since our story was published this week, we’ve been inundated with people confirming the observations in our article,” Swellnet editor Stu Nettle told 9News.
“Form border to border in New South Wales, and up on the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast too, there is a sand surplus.”
You can see the sand surplus on Wollongong’s City Beach in the photos above which were taken by Steen Barnes (there are plenty more beauties on his Instagram feed)
As the Sydney Morning Herald reported recently, Bondi Beach is about 25 metres broader than it was this time last year, while North Narrabeen on Sydney’s Northern Beaches has added a whopping 59 metres of sand since last year.
You might think that more sand is not necessarily a bad thing, but that is unfortunately not the case for surfers.
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“We have so much sand at the moment it’s causing terrible waves, and this isn’t something people have dealt with before,” Nettle explains.
For those of you with a taste for the technicalities of how a well-shaped wave forms, there’s a full explanation at Swellnet with enough scientific and surf jargon to keep everyone from wetsuit-wearers to labcoat types happy.
The quick version is that too much sand hampers the formation of surfable waves, and after three years of beaches being severely eroded during La Niña storms, this is a problem no one expected to face.
If there is any, it’s that there’ll be a lot more towel space on packed city beaches on those super busy summer Saturdays and Sundays.
