Today Sue and I went to a place called Norah Head lighthouse, about a half hour south of Newcastle on the central coast.
It was a lovely and picturesque spot, and below the lighthouse was an expansive area of rockpools. Since it was low tide, we were free to explore them at our leisure.
We saw some brave souls fishing from the edge of the rocks. Fools, some may call them, since they ignored the many warning signs and many fisherman are lost every year from being washed off rocks.
From up on the cliffs near the lighthouse, and only minutes after we arrived, we saw out to sea many sights like this one:
Can you see the little black dot? Here’s a zoomed-in view:
It’s a breaching humpback! The east coast of Australia at this time is ‘humpback highway’ since whales are in the middle of migration north from Antarctica. I had read it was ‘easy’ to see whales off the east coast at this time of year but we were unprepared for just how easy it was!
These are extremely zoomed-in snaps of different whales, but we spotted them dozens and dozens of times in the hour or so we were on the rocks. It’s hard to saw how many different whales we saw, but at one point there were clearly four surfacing at once in different spots. Sue says we saw fifty, and far be it from to suggest that’s an exaggeration 🙂
Afterwards we had some fish and chips for lunch and headed to a lookout further south that we had read was a better whale-spotting point… but saw none there! No worries though, since we had been so lucky before lunch. It was a remarkable experience in a beautiful location 🙂