Booderee

We've recently explored the Booderee Peninsula over 3 days.

A full account of this trip to follow soon ...

Paddle back in time

Today's little adventure began at the mouth of the Minnamurra River, about 100 kilometres south of Sydney.

With a flood tide to catch there was brilliantly clear sea water running uphill into the river's swollen mouth.

Further upstream, in the brackish water of the Minnamurra River, the Illawarra escarpment looms as a continuous backdrop along the western horizon.

This landscape is an excellent morphological analogy for the ancient topography that existed along the Sydney coastline during the last ice age.

That is, a ribbon of vertical sandstone cliffs tumbling down into a wooded plain braided with creeks and rivers feeling their way towards the sea many kilometres further to the east.

When you are next paddling along the base of the Sydney cliffs you may easily imagine that 10,000 years ago, with the sea levels much lower than today, you would have been thrashing through the ancient branches of a cold climate forest.

The Illawarra Escarpment.

Further up the Minnamurra River the woodland and waterways merge into a flooded forest.  An arcade of searching branches and interlocking canopies reflected in the water's calm surface.

Here scuttling beneath the kayak's hull like so many carapaced trilobites were dinner-plate-sized mud crabs. Sydney was once like this too.

Nor-easter

Sydney summer's favourite wind still blowing in March.