Seal Rocks

After our time in Burleigh, we had a week house rental in a small beach town called Seal Rocks. Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of this town, I hadn’t either until I started talking to some Australian surfers who all said it was a great place to stop, small and isolated, and usually had waves. The reason it gets a lot of surf is that it is a small peninsula that sticks way out into the Pacific (in fact it is the second most easterly part of all Australia). It also has both north and south facing beaches, which will catch most swells, and you can find one side with offshore wind. The second nice thing about Seal Rocks is that it is very isolated and separated from everything else by a large National Park (Myall Lakes). They were not kidding when they said “isolated and small”. To get there you leave the main highway and drive 45 minutes on a secondary road, and then you drive another twenty minutes down a country road, a good portion still being gravel. You emerge from the national forest onto a beautiful bay with incredible headlands. On the north side there are two bays, each one about half mile long. On the south side, there is one long bay about 2 miles long, and the historic lighthouse sits on the point between the two bays. The town consists of a Holiday Park (i.e. campsite), maybe thirty homes, and one small store that didn’t even sell beer! Our house was at the end of the road just before the entrance road to the lighthouse (very top center of this picture). Nothing fancy about the house; typical old style beach house with no A/C… Luckily we had some fans and the house sat up on the ridge, so we got nice sea breezes. Unfortunately, there were no waves when we got to the north facing beach, so we decided to explore the other side of the point and see if the south side was better. To access this beach, you walked through the grounds of the lighthouse, then down a short trail to the beach.

Being the beach was only ten minutes away, we thought the walk would be pretty uneventful…fat chance. Five minutes into it, as we were walking down the access road totally by ourselves, a Coastal Taipan comes straight out of the bush, crosses the road no more then ten feet from us, and coils up on the other side. Normally I would have not known what kind of snake this was, it did not look like any snake I had seen before and did not look like other poisonous snakes I have encountered. The odd coincidence was, we had just stopped by a Koala Center on the way down to Seal Rocks and besides having koalas, kangaroos, and other cuddly animals, they had a nice awry of some of the most poisonous snakes in Australia – one of them being the Coastal Taipan. In fact the Coastal Taipan is the FOURTH most poisonous land snake in the World. One bite from this snake has enough venom to kill about 50 People!! Nice way to start our time in Seal Rocks. After spending two weeks in pretty developed areas, I had forgotten that Australia’s wildlife is no joke and there is a lot of stuff that can kill you here. Now we were on high alert, not knowing if this place was full of snakes or we just really lucky to see one (Sally was not feeling lucky about seeing it.). We got to the beach safely, and it was amazing. Huge crescent shape with hardly anyone on it. There was a family in a truck close by, and I noticed they had what I thought was a dog running around them. But it wasn’t a dog, it was the resident wild Dingo, and they were trying to get it to leave them alone. After the Dingo ran off, I asked the guy what was going on, and he said that it comes down looking for easy food and to keep an eye on the small kids and your stuff. Turns out, he is a loner and comes to the beach everyday looking for an easy meal, and will steal your stuff if you don’t pay attention to him. I actually watched him scope out a few small kids that were walking by themselves and another time grab and chew on some guy’s hat that went swimming. We saw him everyday and found out that his name is “Socksie” and he has been around for about four years. Check out Socksie on “Dr. Doolittle”. As you can see, Socksie doesn’t get to eat a lot, and we really felt for him. We would watch him work the whole beach, going from one area to the next, as people would leave, usually coming away with nothing. Even though we wanted to give him some food; we knew this would be the worse thing for him. Feeding animals like this only brings on problems down the road when they get to close to humans and end up biting someone, probably a kid. Then they call the Game Warden to shoot the pest. We kept our food to ourselves, even when he sat down in front of us during our beach sunset dinner and put on his best “Pitiful Puppy” face. The next few days were spent enjoying the beach, even though the waves never showed up. Some other interesting animals we encountered were the “Blue Bottle” jellyfish, very toxic, and a lot of large parrots. Our next stop would be back in Sydney, in order to catch a flight up to Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef.