A long story to a short answer

A few weeks ago most of the five of us (Deb + me, E our eldest and Lu our youngest) went for a weekend drive to part of the Gippsland coast in east Victoria.
Io stayed home with Lilli (no dogs allowed in national parks in Oz)

It was by our standards a fairly short run of only about 2 and a half hours drive each way.
Anyway after having a relaxed lunch and poking around a bit we ended up at the rugged coast line between Cape Paterson and Inverloch.

Deb and Lu looked at the weather,

which was really threatening to rain and elected to stay near the car.

E and I decided to climb the stairs down to the beach to have a look at the rocks out towards this interesting feature called “The Eagles’ Nest”.


To give an idea of scale I would guess it is around 5 stories high with the cliffs about double that.

Despite the threatening storm and the late afternoon we took advantage of the fact that the tide was falling quickly. You can see as we crossed the area the platform was becoming exposed by the retreating tide.

Interestingly the rock platform at the base  is made up of sedimentary rock that was formed on a flood plain back in the Cretaceous about 115,000,000 years ago.

One beach to the east is the only current dinosaur fossil dig in Victoria known as the “Dinosaur Dreaming” dig. And in 1903 just to the west was the first discovery of a dinosaur fossil in Oz known as  the “Cape Paterson Claw”.
So as well as the usual hunt for starfish and periwinkles I had my eye open for fossils.
As we got closer to the Eagles’ Nest
I began noticing literally dozens of chunks of petrified wood in the stone.
This was the largest piece we found.
I like the way the water was rippling across it in this piccie.

And from another angle with E’s hand to give a scale.

As you can see it was a decent size and beautifully preserved. It was hard to believe it felt like solid rock, not wood, to the touch.

Now we come to part of the point of this whole story.
One of the local denizens was this White-faced Heron, Egretta novaehollandiae

I took a few shots of him before he took off.

For those of you who guessed feathers for this image you were 100% right.
 
Here is the un-cropped piccie

I told you I wasn’t going to be tricky!

Gippsland

Once again it is longer than I would have liked between posts.

I mentioned that Deb and I drove across to Gippsland (the eastern section of Victoria).
Well one of Deb’s colleagues owns a holiday house at Cape Paterson and she kindly lent it to us for the weekend.

As you can see the road out front is very wet, it rained for much of our trip down. We have had a really wet winter, with rain more often than not. We were worried that it would rain the whole weekend, but it cleared up soon after we got there.

The house is right across the road from the beach. After we got the car unpacked we went for a stroll along the beach in the evening light.

I loved the waves breaking over these rocks.As we walked further along the beach I took photos back towards the East


The waves have carved this rock full of holes and basins. These couple of piccies feature the rocks and in the distance Cape Liptrap.At the tip of Cape Patterson is a reef that extends out into Bass Strait. Bass Straight lies between the Aussie Mainland and Tasmania.

We happily strolled across the rocks of the reef. The light was painting the rocks gorgeous colours.About now we had a near disaster. They didn’t look it, but many of these rocks were treacherously slippery.

As Deb stepped from one rock to another her foot skidded and she fell straight down onto the rocks on her front.

I raced across to where she was lying; it was a terrifying experience. I had thoughts of Deb suffering concussion and broken bones.

Fortunately, things weren’t as bad as they might have been.
She slightly grazed her chin and hands. Her worst injury was to her shoulders. She jarred both as she threw her hands out to stop her face smacking into the stone. Poor Deb has been stiff and sore all week.

Not surprisingly that put an end to our walk. We went straight back to the house where I lit a roaring fire and made Deb a hot drink. Once we got warm Deb felt a bit less sore and sorry and we had a evening watching movies and planning our next day.