Warriewood

Warriewood is the one everybody drives past, and I say that with real affection. It's a short beach, hemmed in by headlands at both ends, with a car park you'd never find unless you were looking, and there's no ocean pool, which matters to me more than it probably should. Most of my work along this coast has a pool in it somewhere, so Warriewood is where I have to photograph the water on its own terms, and can't hide behind a nice bit of concrete.

But the southern end's the reason to walk down. There's a small waterfall that comes off the rock and lands on moss, shallow caves you can stand up in, and rock pools so full of periwinkles they'll hold a six year old for an hour, and none of it's visible from the road above, so you have to go down and look. So people stand at the top of the ramp, decide the surf looks average and go home, which I've never once tried to talk anybody out of.

The surf club here's one of the youngest on the peninsula. Locals were asking the council for lifesaving gear here as early as 1927, and it still took until 1950 for a club to form (twelve blokes, and not much else). Over the headland to the north there's Turimetta, which has no road above it, no club, no toilets and no patrol, so it stays a locals' beach, mostly because getting there is annoying enough to put people off.

I photograph Warriewood in the hour before sunrise, when the cliffs behind are still black, and every bit of colour in the place is sitting in the water. The headlands put the beach in a bowl, so on a still morning the noise drops away and you can hear the water coming off the rocks at the southern end over the top of the surf. Then I usually stop working for a minute, which isn't a professional habit, but there it is.