Hello Friends,

Had a meeting down at Clontarf, so on the way back I took the opportunity to check out a few beaches and to grab some snaps with Nikon’s whizzy new D700 digital SLR. Manly was relatively small, but from about North Steyne up to Queenscliff, there were some rather clean and fun size sets getting in. It was moderately busy, but by Manly standards, relatively uncrowded. Wind was straight offshore too. It was pretty inconsistent (as was Dee Why beach where I surfed this morning), but there’d be a few people with happy memories from a partly cloudy winter’s afternoon at Manly.

Around the corner at Curly, there were only a few folks scattered along the beach. Again, the consistency was a problem, but the sets looked okay up toward the middle and there were a few into the shoulder high plus range.

A small group of whale watchers (and a helicopter) were checking out a mother and calf who were lazing about around 200 metres due east of south Curly pool.

Dee Why looked about the same as this morning, but the point definitely seemed smaller. However, I didn’t stop to check it out properly…

According to the MHL buoy, our swell has dropped down to around 2 metres. It’s still SSE and 10 seconds apart. The trend is likely to continue overnight, with sub 2 metre, sub 10 sec period stuff for tomorrow.

(BTW, if you’d like to see what my tech editor at Photo Review thinks of the Nikon D700, click here. I’ll be writing up a few thoughts on both the D700 and D300 from a surf photography perspective in the next week or so.)

Okay, here are a few piccies…