March 05 - After spending the morning on South Stradbroke Island (See here), I grabbed a quick crab sandwich at the Spit cafe and started driving South. My plan was to cruise all the way to the NSW border in Tweed Heads, taking photos as I went and perhaps stopping at Kirra for a bit of a surf if things were going well.

Things did not go well... At my first stop, Main Beach, I took the picture above before moving on to Burleigh Heads. The wind was already blowing a gale onshore, making a mess of the surf, as you can see. If you look closely at the middle of the picture you can even see the sand the wind was picking up all along the Gold Coast strip.

By the time I got to Burleigh the wind was really howling. They had a surf comp on, but not much was happening. I climbed down on some rocks to get a better view but slipped on ssome wet algea, damaging both my camera and my shoulder. This meant I could take no more photos and even if there was something to surf on that wasn't wind affected, it wouldn't be much fun paddling out there. I decided to cut my losses and headed back to the business end of the coast where I booked myself into the Meriton and drowned my sorrows.

The picture below was similar to the view I had from my hotel room as the sun went down. I took this pic a few years earlier from the Novotel. Below it is another I took on that trip, this one of a defeated surfer leaving the water at Noosa Heads. Noosa is a couple of hours North of Surfers.