Pelican Yoga Posts

A river’s mouth and the beach it breaches – or only sometimes manages to breach –  can be very dynamic places.

From one visit to another, they may display utterly different “faces” to an occasional visitor.

Anyone familiar with the mouth of the not-so-mighty Murray, adjacent to the Coorong, knows that even a river mouth’s “precise” location can be a highly-movable feast…or famine.

This is also true of many much more “modest” rivers, such as the Warren.

On the winter morning of 16 August, this particular meeting of river and ocean underwent many changes in mood, even within a single half-hour.

  This post’s and the previous chapter’s photos were taken within the space of one minute, from almost the very same spot on Yeagarup Beach.…

Untarnished, but sometimes “stained”…benignly.

I took the photo at 11.19 pm on 16 August, when a handful of humans stood on Yeagarup Beach.

This is where the Warren River meets the Southern Ocean.

In global terms, the Warren is “modest”, in both length and average flow rate.

However, its lower reaches are glorious.  Beautiful, globally unique, very tall, never-logged forests segue to dunes, an estuary and a truly wild ocean shore.

As evident in the featured image, when a “properly” wet winter feeds it, the Warren carries enough tannin-rich water to darken the Southern Ocean’s edge.

(and – as a future chapter will show – the river’s mouth then moves “up the beach”, which it reshapes)