Collaroy

If you know one thing about Collaroy, it's probably that photograph of somebody's pool lying on its side in the sand, and I can't hold it against you, because that weekend was extraordinary. An east coast low turned up on top of a spring tide in June 2016, waves of around thirteen metres recorded offshore, and by Monday morning a row of houses had lost backyards, decks and, in one case, an entire pool signed off as able to survive a one in a hundred year storm. The beach itself went back fifty metres.

Then the sand came back, the way sand does, and it's been coming and going on its own schedule since. We know that here with a precision you won't find anywhere else, because Collaroy and Narrabeen are really one unbroken beach, and somebody has surveyed its profile every single month since 1976. It started with a coastal scientist from the University of Sydney, it's run now by engineers at UNSW, and it means that on any morning I've stood there with a camera, somebody has a measurement of the sand under my feet.

None of which is what gets you out of bed. The pool does, though. It's a fifty metre oblong that refuses to be a rectangle, with a wading pool alongside, no gate, no lifeguard and no closing time, and the regulars are in it before there's light to swim by. Come winter, the crowd thins to the people who've been at this thirty years, and that's my favourite time to be down there.

I shoot it from the northern wall on a rising tide, because that's where the swell wraps in and breaks across the corner, and you get the two things I want in one frame, still water inside the wall and moving water outside it. Late autumn is best (the sun's further north by then, so the light runs along the wall instead of across it). But I've spent plenty of mornings up on that wall and come home with nothing.