What do you do when it’s low to mid-30s day after day after day? You go to the beach!

Our choice of beach this past weekend was Surf Beach on the south coast of Phillip Island – an easy 90 minute drive from Melbourne. We had a fantastic southerly coming in off the Southern Ocean that brought the temperature down just the right amount. There weren’t many people there and as you can see, the water was amazing! Shallow and warm – perfect for a family day at the beach.

This is one of the reasons I love Australia.

 

 

I’m 90% sure this image is Buffalo Beach in Western Australia. The sand is gorgeous. The beach just goes and goes. And, it’s a hot spot for folks looking to catch their dinner from the Indian Ocean. Flathead and salmon are two local varieties that might turn up on the end of someone’s line. Just watching these people fish, I didn’t quite get how it worked. Fishing into crashing waves seems like it wouldn’t really work. I would expect my line to keep getting tossed back at me, especially looking at how far back these guys are standing from the water.

There’s good reason to stand back though. You can see how high the waves come up by looking just in front of the gent in the foreground. He’s just beyond the reach of the high waves.

If you’re like us and you turn up to Buffalo Beach without fishing gear and you’re thinking this surf looks a little rough for your 3-year-old (as she was at the time) the next best activity is chasing waves down to the water and then running and screaming up the beach trying to avoid getting caught by the next big one coming in. When you successfully reach the dry sand untouched by the big wave, you look at each other gravely and say “that was a Big One” while thinking to yourselves that you’re glad we didn’t lose anyone that time. Then, you do it all over again.