Lagoon Beach (T 343)

When a new friend said she felt like an all day walk I translated that into somewhere easy, somewhere short and somewhere straightforward because I had no time to plan  and I had a leg that had become the arena for lightning bolts of pain.  I figured we were sure to find a track that met these criteria on the Tasman Peninsula somewhere.

The peninsula was green and resplendent after rain and we were lured down the road to Lime Bay.  I’d camped there once, years ago, and expecting to see no one there we were amazed by all the tents, activity and music at the campground.

Sundra was immediately hungry and while she ate an early lunch I read the sign that described the route to Lagoon Beach, then returned to the  car to photograph the relevant pages of my guidebook.  Soon we were heading off along the hot track to Lagoon Beach through coastal scrub and beneath a shady canopy.  We were talking enthusiastically and were inattentive to our surroundings.  We paid little heed to the dry lagoon at the base of the palaeodune  we clambered up, but I did recall it from last time.  We did not look back to register our surroundings or to note the way we’d arrived on the beach, because coming over the top of the dunes we were enthralled by the view of the  sea and the  fingers of land all about us.  We should have brought bathers.

Except for three couples sun baking and a yacht anchored in the lee of the southern headland the beach was empty and so, with no regard to the pages I’d photographed we walked south, thinking that a track might possibly take us over the southern headland. There, beneath the cliffs we found a wooden seat and a sand castle, and after eating a second lunch and admiring a couple of pied oystercatchers, our cursory search produced no evidence of a track, although I later discovered there is one.  And so we meandered slowly back up the beach, enjoying walking barefoot in the water.  And that, I felt, was enough of a walk for my grouchy leg.  Sundra, energetic and adventurous, felt the day had barely got started.

The couples were gone.  The marker she’d had the foresight to place in the sand where we’d entered the beach had been kidnapped by the rising tide.  For well over an hour we wandered up and down the dunes, trying to trace footsteps – anybody’s footsteps – that would return us to the track.  How weird to be lost on a beach, I thought, squinting at the pages I’d photographed to my phone.  I was pretty sure the best plan was to head directly back to camp and that if we headed for the trees we’d surely find the path, but our memories didn’t coincide.  Meandering about on the dunes we  had by now utterly confused ourselves, creating patterns of circuitous footsteps that now overlaid anything that had been there before.

But at least there was wifi. ‘Lost,’ I texted back  home.

The pages I’d photographed were no help, especially when read with an increasingly distracted mind.  I did a Google search and found a helpful blog that talked about exiting the beach at the northern headland  with a picture helpfully included.  There was red tape up there.  If you followed it, it would take you across the headland (Green Head, apparently) to another smaller beach.  This blogger had then turned back.  Noting the sun’s position in the western sky I was all for turning back too.  I was still reasonably confident that if we returned to the forest behind the dry lake we’d easily reach the campground again.  A nightmare I’d had of being lost on the peninsula began to haunt me.

We returned to the northern headland we’d previously rejected as a possibility and scrambled up the steep slope that definitely did not look like it led to a path and after a bit of searching we found some red tape dangling from a branch.  We walked a little further and found just enough tape to keep taking us forwards.  We went down to explore the  beach referred to in the blog (Lagoon Beach North) and then went back up on the cliff again and followed the red tape until in the middle of nowhere no more tape was to be found.  From here the bays and inlets and fingers of land still confused me.  I had no idea what we were looking across the water at and thought that late in the day though it was, we were still better retreating than trusting to the traces of path that might be ahead.  Little did I know that the cliff tops here are shallow overhangs and considered dangerous (Leaman, 1999).

Sundra impressed me with her relaxed ‘ever onwards’ attitude.  When the red tape ceased again we ended up walking in different circles in search of  the oh so faint trail that often looked animal made.  It seemed that the trees our red bread crumbs had been attached to had relinquished their hold during storms of long ago or the tape had simply blown away in gales.

Keeping in visual contact with the shore while Sundra’s voice receded further away I tried to figure out our position on Memory Maps and Navionics and every other app I had available but nothing gave me the precise, localised information we needed – a clear track back to camp – a Lime Bay for Dummies kind of instruction.  I cursed myself for leaving the relevant map at home.

‘Still no idea where we are,’ I texted home, to the concerned enquiries.  No idea where Sundra was either.

The afternoon was softening into evening.  I suspected we would be sleeping out.  From somewhere far away Sundra called out.  Tramping around energetically, she’d found a tiny remnant of red tape, enough to lead us forward a little further but in what to me looked like an inauspicious direction.

Each tag seemed to take longer to find but we held on to a blind faith that we would arrive somewhere sometime.  On two or three more occasions we lost the  little red tapes seemingly forever and it was with some trepidation that we cut away from the cliffs to enter a thicker section of forest.  We walked downhill away from the coast and with a hefty sense of relief found at the bottom (incredibly, disbelievingly) the track we’d walked out along hours earlier.

There was the coastline we’d passed on our way to Lagoon Beach, one or two children still swimming in the water.  We had never been that far away we now realised.   I thought admiringly of sailors who navigate themselves across oceans.  I clearly couldn’t navigate myself across a pyrex bowl.  And I’m obviously imminently capable of getting lost in a backyard copse of trees.

Dadirri is an Aboriginal word for deep listening to others and to the landscape.  It’s used in both the Ngan’gikurunggurr and Ngen’giwumirri, languages from the Daly River region a couple of hundred kilometres south of Darwin.  Feeling lost in the bush, that still, quiet awareness was hard to come by that day.  Sundra had long ago finished her water and we were sharing the little I had left.     We had no GPS and the battery on my phone was getting low.

Dadirri  also refers to the awareness of ‘where you’ve come from, why you are here, where are you going now and where you belong.’ We’d done a lot of talking that day about just those topics.  I thought that night was likely to teach us about “the quiet stillness and the waiting” aspect of dadirri (Ungunmerr-Baumann)  and provide us with long hours to pick apart our mistakes.

Instead, as we travelled home after what had ended up being a six hour walk, we laughed as we reviewed the day and agreed that there was scope to do more walks together, perhaps with a bit more preparation.

But then again, without a map you really feel like you are more properly exploring!  (I am not recommending this though!)

If, one day, lost on Lagoon Beach, this is the blog you discover then be aware that the densely vegetated headland to the south is called Lobster Point and Sloping (Slopen) Main beach lies some distance away on the other side. The 1.6 km stretch of sand  that is Lagoon Beach lies in the lee of Sloping Island and it’s wise not go tramping about on the 15m high foredunes and their blowouts, particularly for their sakes. Take careful note of Sloping Lagoon which links the beach to the rear end of western Lime Bay beach.  There’s also a smaller lagoon at the northern end of the beach.

And perhaps, rather than following the disused and apparently closed track we were on – we did this walk in 2016 so this may have changed –  take your bike and go cycling around Lagoon Beach using these comprehensive notes on cycling in this area from Tassie Trails.

If geology is your thing there’s a dyke on Lobster Point and apparently on Green Head we were walking over all sorts of interesting volcanic and sedimentary geology which that day we were blind to.  Those dunes we came over – they’re interesting too. Grab a copy of Walk into History in Southern Tasmania by David Leaman and he’ll illuminate the geological wonders for you.  And go on the low tide – that way you can walk around the base of Green Head staying safer and not getting lost.