Ralphs Bay

Now whilst I do love to photograph waves crashing on the shore, Gaia and her daughter Tethys dancing and playing, sometimes gently and sometimes in fury, I also have a fascination with estuaries and rias (river valleys part drowned in post glaciation sea level rises) where their very enclosure precludes all but the smallest waves. In such places you can watch the blurred boundary between land and sea as tides come and go over marshes and mud flats. These places can be just as treacherous as the crashing waves, with quicksands and tides travelling faster than you can run over the flat sands and creeks. The preceding images come from the ocean side of South Arm, Tasmania. Yet scarce a hundred metres away across the dunes is Ralphs Bay, a tidal lagoon almost entirely surrounded by land. A quiet place of gentle waters, mud flats, wading birds and small clusters of houses. I got to spend too little time there, after all you can only do so much in one trip, and yet I hope to return to explore more of this ‘in between’ world.

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