How I learned to love the ocean

For each of us, there are places in nature that make us feel good. They calm the senses and charge us with life. For me it is mountains and wild mountain streams. They never fail to make me feel whole, happy and about 9 years old. I come from the mountains and think about home always being a place in the mountains.

I adore any wild place in nature and have fallen in love with deserts, tropical rainforest, grassy fields, snowy valleys and lazy rivers. However, the Ocean has always been an enigma to me.

My beach trips as a child were mostly noisy, holiday visits with family to city beaches like Bondi. These were great times, but in my mind the beach was a place of sun burn, stinging eyes, car parks, dirty sand and chiko roll wrappers.

I have been lucky since then to see some spectacularly beautiful and famous beaches and coasts across Australia and the world. I've explored them by diving, paddling, swimming, walking, running, fishing, boarding and sailing. I've partied on them, played on them, had moonlit picnics on them and gotten windswept and interesting on them.

But I have never been able to understand the ocean. Have not felt the magnetic tug to be near or in the ocean. Maybe to me it is too big a thing for my mind to take in. So much sand, so much water, so much sky. Lurid in its vastness.

But now the ocean has won me over. I’ve spent the last seven months leading multi-day walks in two incredibly beautiful coastal areas of eastern Tasmania; the Bay of Fires and Maria Island. Pretty convincing parts of the coast...

What has changed for me is now I really see the ocean as a place of life. I have learnt about many shellfish who have complex lives and finely etched designs. Rockpools full of blooming blood red anemones, sea dragons with their frilly beauty. And the birds! Sea birds are in their own league when it comes to quirky and beautiful; oystercatchers, terns, gulls, tiny hooded plovers, eagles, turnstones, cormorants and gannets. All who make the beach their home for a time, or a lifetime.

Aboriginal life on the coast is so keenly felt from the vast number of living places along the coast here. Huge mounds of shells, eaten over thousands of years of harvesting from the ever abundant ocean. 

The turn of the seasons is so tangible on the beach; the migration of grand humpback whales down to their summer grounds in the southern waters, the frolicking of a seal, coming in close to the bay on his way up to the breeding grounds in bass strait, the shorttailed shearwaters and albatross on their worldwide tours, fairy penguins with their silver-blue feathers and their unending toil in tending to their chicks until they are old enough to try and attempt a life at sea. 

I have been blessed to see enough perfect sunrises, sunsets and night skies over the ocean to last me a lifetime. The smell, the air and the wind have worked their magic. The wave worn pebbles and the ancient boulders have made the difference. The sea has made me feel at home with its colours and moods and tides.

I love the ocean!