Passage of Time. Moonlight Head on the Great Ocean Road

Moonlight Head is on The Great Ocean Road, south west Victoria, along a stretch of coastline known as “Shipwreck Coast”

I had heard that there were two anchors embedded into rock and wanted to see them for myself.

One anchor is off the Marie Gabrielle, wrecked on 25th November 1869, and the other is off the Fiji, wrecked in 1891.

My husband, Robert, and I drove along a dusty corrugated gravel road to an empty carpark. We took to the track to walk down to the beach but as we started to walk Robert noticed two sign posts that didn’t make him very happy. One said that there were about 320 steps down onto the beach and the other said that there were snakes around.

Still I insisted that I wanted to see the anchors, so down we went, keeping an eye out for snakes.

When we got down to the beach there were no anchors to be seen. I was disappointed but didn’t want to just give up so I searched the horizon and there they were, about a kilometre down the beach.

Once we got there I could see that it was well worth the walk. Above are some of the images that I captured on that day. The day was very dull so to ensure I captured as much detail as possible I set the ISO on to 400 with the aperture at f/11 and speed at 1-320. Looking at these images, I was able to capture not only the detail of the anchor but also the moodiness of the sky and ocean in the background.

The lesson from this adventure is to never try to talk a photographer out of venturing to her destination, you’ll never succeed!