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khiemtranAs promised, next up is an adventure out to The Rip. This is no place for kayaks, so instead we'll take a short ride in a fast machine...
While we're waiting for the tour to start, we might be lucky enough to spot a stingray cruising through the marina. There's actually a rather controversial plan to set up a stingray feeding site here as a tourist attraction. On the one hand, the local fishermen say they've always been feeding the stingrays here. On the other, interfering with a delicate ecology and potentially creating dependencies on humans is always a fraught business.
We're all offered jackets as part of the tour. Even though it's a hot day, I suggest you wear yours. This boat goes fast, and the breeze it creates is freezing.
In next to no time, we're heading out through the heads. The small tower on the very right is near where we started, at the Queenscliff boat harbour. Just to the right of that, on the very edge of the photo, is the Queenscliff-to-Sorrento ferry, the modern equivalent of the Ozone. In the middle of the photo you can see the various lighthouses and navigation markers that guide ships in through the narrow shipping lane into Port Phillip Bay. By lining them up in different ways, pilots can tell at a glance where in the shipping lane they are. The pilot station is actually just at the base of that rocky point. That large black lighthouse is actually part of the Queenscliff fort. More on that later...
And so on to The Rip. As I mentioned earlier, Port Phillip Bay is basically a wide flat lagoon with a very narrow entrance. This means that even a comparatively small change in tide height results in a very large volume of water rushing in and out of the heads, creating a a very strong current. Even worse, when it meets the swell from the ocean, it can set up giant standing waves that get bigger and bigger.
Up close, the sea is a tangled mess of different currents as the turbulent waters swirl around. In the middle of this picture, you can just see a giant circular eddy as water is being sucked down to the bottom in an inverted tornado. Fall in here and you're going to be pulled straight down. It's deep too. Although most of the bay is very shallow, there's a deep canyon below us almost a hundred metres deep.
And here you can see a thermocline - where cold water is being pulled back up to the surface. The thermocline is the smooth patch of water that stands out from the rough textured sea around it. You can see another one a bit further back on the right. Thermoclines are particularly dangerous to scuba divers as being rapidly pulled up to the surface can give them the bends.
Standing waves, eddies and thermoclines all combined. This is one treacherous piece of water. It is little surprise that there have been a great many shipwrecks in this area. Fortunately, most of the wrecks involved very little loss of life, as the ships tended to founder on the shallow reefs on each side of The Rip, from which the passengers and crews could be rescued, and the cargo salvaged by enterprising locals. Not far away at Point Lonsdale, there was a rocket battery which would fire rockets over ships on the reef, dragging cables behind them to assist in rescues.
As we watch, the Spirit of Tasmania heads out on her regular run from Melbourne to Devonport on the other side of Bass Straight. The Spirit of Tasmania is one of the few commercial ships allowed to enter and exit the bay without a pilot from the pilot station, although she nearly had a drama on this day. A small boat was fishing in the middle of the shipping lane and a police launch had to come out to get them to move. The Spirit of Tasmania had already started to divert at the point (these ships need a lot of time to change direction at high speed), and she finished up scraping against the very edge of the defined shipping lane.
Drama over, we head across the other side of the heads, where we find the national park at Point Nepean. That structure at the base of the point is another fort. Apparently, they once had a mirror there and a searchlight at Point Lonsdale which shone at the mirror, so they could tell if a ship was trying to pass through in the night.
Just beyond Point Nepean, the old quarantine station. The site was chosen more or less on the spur of the moment when a ship called the Ticonderoga arrived in 1852, stricken with typhus and scarlet fever. Rather than let the ship continue on to Melbourne, it was decided to let it anchor at Point Nepean instead, and the quarantine station was quickly gazetted and augmented over the years. The chimney you can see was from the boilers used for sterilising clothing and bedding.
These days the quarantine station is part of the national park, but the area adjoining the park is prime real estate, where even a bathing box can cost up to half a million dollars. But next up, we'll meet some inhabitants of the bay who have even better more prime real estate and don't even pay a cent for it...
While we're waiting for the tour to start, we might be lucky enough to spot a stingray cruising through the marina. There's actually a rather controversial plan to set up a stingray feeding site here as a tourist attraction. On the one hand, the local fishermen say they've always been feeding the stingrays here. On the other, interfering with a delicate ecology and potentially creating dependencies on humans is always a fraught business.
We're all offered jackets as part of the tour. Even though it's a hot day, I suggest you wear yours. This boat goes fast, and the breeze it creates is freezing.
In next to no time, we're heading out through the heads. The small tower on the very right is near where we started, at the Queenscliff boat harbour. Just to the right of that, on the very edge of the photo, is the Queenscliff-to-Sorrento ferry, the modern equivalent of the Ozone. In the middle of the photo you can see the various lighthouses and navigation markers that guide ships in through the narrow shipping lane into Port Phillip Bay. By lining them up in different ways, pilots can tell at a glance where in the shipping lane they are. The pilot station is actually just at the base of that rocky point. That large black lighthouse is actually part of the Queenscliff fort. More on that later...
And so on to The Rip. As I mentioned earlier, Port Phillip Bay is basically a wide flat lagoon with a very narrow entrance. This means that even a comparatively small change in tide height results in a very large volume of water rushing in and out of the heads, creating a a very strong current. Even worse, when it meets the swell from the ocean, it can set up giant standing waves that get bigger and bigger.
Up close, the sea is a tangled mess of different currents as the turbulent waters swirl around. In the middle of this picture, you can just see a giant circular eddy as water is being sucked down to the bottom in an inverted tornado. Fall in here and you're going to be pulled straight down. It's deep too. Although most of the bay is very shallow, there's a deep canyon below us almost a hundred metres deep.
And here you can see a thermocline - where cold water is being pulled back up to the surface. The thermocline is the smooth patch of water that stands out from the rough textured sea around it. You can see another one a bit further back on the right. Thermoclines are particularly dangerous to scuba divers as being rapidly pulled up to the surface can give them the bends.
Standing waves, eddies and thermoclines all combined. This is one treacherous piece of water. It is little surprise that there have been a great many shipwrecks in this area. Fortunately, most of the wrecks involved very little loss of life, as the ships tended to founder on the shallow reefs on each side of The Rip, from which the passengers and crews could be rescued, and the cargo salvaged by enterprising locals. Not far away at Point Lonsdale, there was a rocket battery which would fire rockets over ships on the reef, dragging cables behind them to assist in rescues.
As we watch, the Spirit of Tasmania heads out on her regular run from Melbourne to Devonport on the other side of Bass Straight. The Spirit of Tasmania is one of the few commercial ships allowed to enter and exit the bay without a pilot from the pilot station, although she nearly had a drama on this day. A small boat was fishing in the middle of the shipping lane and a police launch had to come out to get them to move. The Spirit of Tasmania had already started to divert at the point (these ships need a lot of time to change direction at high speed), and she finished up scraping against the very edge of the defined shipping lane.
Drama over, we head across the other side of the heads, where we find the national park at Point Nepean. That structure at the base of the point is another fort. Apparently, they once had a mirror there and a searchlight at Point Lonsdale which shone at the mirror, so they could tell if a ship was trying to pass through in the night.
Just beyond Point Nepean, the old quarantine station. The site was chosen more or less on the spur of the moment when a ship called the Ticonderoga arrived in 1852, stricken with typhus and scarlet fever. Rather than let the ship continue on to Melbourne, it was decided to let it anchor at Point Nepean instead, and the quarantine station was quickly gazetted and augmented over the years. The chimney you can see was from the boilers used for sterilising clothing and bedding.
These days the quarantine station is part of the national park, but the area adjoining the park is prime real estate, where even a bathing box can cost up to half a million dollars. But next up, we'll meet some inhabitants of the bay who have even better more prime real estate and don't even pay a cent for it...
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Date: 2016-01-12 03:32 pm (UTC)I'll say! But what fascinating maritime history...
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Date: 2016-01-12 06:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-12 03:53 pm (UTC)Meant to add: And argh to that fishing boat! I am not at all against fishing, but against fishing where one should not be? Most definitely! When we lived in Mayotte, we would dive in the "passe en S," which was part of a reserve/no-fishing zone. That didn't stop local fishers from dragging a line through when they navigated in and out of the pass. Talk about frightening for divers!
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Date: 2016-01-12 06:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-01-14 07:28 pm (UTC)The thought of being pulled down by that eddy is terrifying.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-14 07:44 pm (UTC)Looking at the internet though, the term "thermocline" seems to actually apply to a boundary between water at different depths where the temperature changes more rapidly than the rest. So, the guide may have used the wrong term, or the smooth patches happened to be places where the thermocline was sucked up to the surface...