Spring has sprung.....

Usually it would be the sounds of birds chirping hopefully, flowers popping up in happy colourful profusion, winter coats being stored away.... but PE is never a place that can be considered predictable and boring, so on our spring day yesterday, we had a big surprise. Our coastline was pounded by Tsunami type waves, railway lines covered with huge chunks of the concrete breakwater wall, businesses flooded, and the freeway closed most of the day due to waves crashing over the inbound lane, resulting in a mega traffic jam. We were returning from a drive in search of snow, and were stuck in the thick of it. It took over two and a half hours to travel the few km between Bluewater Bay and Albany Road!

On the plus side, being stuck in a traffic jam gives the opportunity to take pix of things that usually whizz by in a flash, so our daughter K was hanging out of the window shooting off Gigs of photos! Even a prolonged time spent in "smelly creek", a road between the Carbon black factory on one side and the sewerage reclamation works on the other, which is usually NOT a place one chooses to hang around too long, yielded a few interesting shots, so expect extended spring day coverage over the next few days!

And obviously more than one shot today hehe! The mouth of the Swartkops River was raging as we crossed the bridge, and the grassy section between the dunes and the freeway had been transformed into a lake.

here was the Swartkops mouth on a normal (if rather bleak) day last month.

All the grass you see in the dark area of the foreground is now under water.

And by comparison, this is how it looked yesterday. Heaving seas, usually not visible beyond the dunes which line this section of the freeway. The lake in the foreground is usually a grassland!

The waves were massive, and bear in mind that we were there an hour and a half after peak spring high tide, and the swell had subsided considerably since the morning! Brighton Pier, where fisherman usually stand and fish, took a real pounding, in fact the waves were so high over it that it is hard to imagine that it normally stands far above the sea!

Just so you can see the difference, here it is on the day we went whale watching, (and the swell was pretty big even then)

And yesterday, you could barely make out the pier under the massive breakers! We'll show you more tomorrow.