Satellite image of Stockton showing Nobby's islet at far bottom, and the Hunter River breakwalls that cut the northwards flow of sand. Stay tuned for a Swellnet story on the situation at Stockton. Many solutions have been proffered but none followed up. With no natural sand supply to build a buffer zone, each swell reclaims more of the Stockton foredunes and it’ll soon take buildings. It also meant that the northwards sand flow completely bypassed Stockton and created a long term erosion problem. It extended a kilometre out to sea and combined with the north-eastern orientation it created a large, moderately sheltered bay at Stockton. In 1912 work on the northern breakwall was finished. Hello Newcastle Harbour! Not the port but the demonic righthander that breaks inside the river.
The causeway was shortly followed up with a longer breakwall which redirected the Hunter River and scoured a deep channel along the northern side of the breakwall. In 1846 work on Australia’s first artificial wave inadvertently began when a causeway was built between the mainland and Nobby’s, a small islet near the mouth of the Hunter River. To give an illustration we’ll kick off at the same place the previous article began - Newcastle. The people sending those emails had a point: when you cheer on dumb luck you should also acknowledge the negative impacts of breakwalls - the lost waves and the eroded coasts. That article had only been published a short time when the emails starting coming in about the flipside, all the waves that we’ve lost. I say unwittingly because there was precisely zero modelling done to determine side effects and the same amount of consideration given to surfing amenity, and yet somehow a number of great waves were created. The article documented all the great waves unwittingly created by coastal breakwaters. Late last year Swellnet published an article on breakwaters where we described them as “surfing’s happy accident”.
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