COVID-19 Disrupts Unpatrolled Beaches Research

An important component of our NSW Government Water Safety Fund project ‘Identifying Rip Currents and Beach Usage at Unpatrolled Beach Locations’ was to conduct face to face surveys of beachgoers visiting the unpatrolled beaches monitored by the remote trail cameras. We really wanted to know who visits these beaches and why - and we definitely hoped to capture the social media driven Instagrammers. With a team in place, ethics approval from the university and surveys printed, COVID-19 came along and stuffed up our plans, like so many others.

The good news is that we’re sending a team of students down to Merry Beach on the NSW South Coast and to Turrimetta Beach (pictured) in Sydney in January 2021 to get a nice sample of via COVID-safe, socially distanced beach user surveys. We’ll likely be collecting surveys at these, and other beach locations, through April 2021 – if you’re keen to help, please contact us!

The picture of Turrimetta is an interesting one. It’s from our research camera that was installed in a remote spider-infested location (according toMitch Harley) on the cliff face and it was hard to get a decent blue-sky image from last summer given all the bushfire smoke. What it does show is a reasonably popular beach in Sydney’s Northern Beaches – that is completely unpatrolled!