Kayaking Adventures: More birds than Kakadu

The guide book in our accommodation informed us that the Myall Lakes area is home to more bird species than Kakadu, they certainly make themselves known every morning and we saw plenty of them while out in the kayaks.
Given the windy conditions we'd experienced over the preceding days, on my third day at Hawks Nest we decided to head up to the lakes to try to find some calmer conditions.

We launched from the Mungo Brush camping area - outside of school holidays there's plenty of parking here and great little sandy beaches to launch from. The usual NPWS parking fees apply.
The lake, the most southern of the Myall Lakes is called Bombah Broadwater, the western side can see heavy boat traffic as holiday makers and locals make there way up the Myall River and through to connecting lakes to the north. We hugged the shoreline to the east.

We'd made it so far around the lake that we (okay, I) decided we should try to make it all the way to the car ferry at Bombah Point - turns out I was being a little ambitious - but we got pretty close before we realised we needed to head back before we got too exhausted to get there!
You can just see the ferry in the middle-distance, centre frame (so close!):

We then decided to straight-line it back to Mungo Brush - a shorter distance but pretty hard going against the wind and we already pretty fatigued, not to mention the mental challenges of feeling like you're going nowhere when in the middle of a large body of water!

Back at Mungo Brush

After three days straight of morning paddles we decided a sleep-in was in order, we'd also noticed that despite weather predictions to the contrary the afternoons were offering up much nicer paddling conditions.
Even after a sleep-in though my fellow paddler staged a mutiny and I was on my own for this short but beautiful late afternoon paddle.
I launched at the Hawks Nest boat ramp and headed down river which required very little paddling as I drifted with the outgoing tide. The afternoon light was stunning and the water was like glass.
The tide was running much faster than I anticipated and a second or so after I'd stopped paddling to take the following photo I banged into the structure the birds are sitting on and Discovery gained her first cosmetic damage.

It was a stunning afternoon on the water with plenty of birds around, fish jumping and very few boats. Unfortunately I had left my run a little late in the day and I had to head back much sooner than I would have liked so as not to get caught in the dark - future purchases will definitely include lights!

A pair of Black Swans enjoying the afternoon:

Soldier crabs!

Racing the sun home:

A little 360 degree video of my view that afternoon.

The next and final day at Hawks Nest had to be an afternoon paddle too - it was just so spectacularly beautiful the day before.
Kell and I put the kayaks in at the Tea Gardens boat ramp so that we could go a little further up river. We headed for Swan Bay knowing the waterway would be sheltered and that we'd have the opportunity to see plenty of bird life, all without having to worry about boats venturing into the shallow waters at low tide.

We circumnavigated the island in Swan Bay in an anti-clockwise direction and we certainly weren't disappointment with the bird population - birds spotted included grebes, cormorants, egrets, herons, spoonbills, ibis, terns, pelicans (of course) and the eponymous Black Swan.

Perhaps we should have taken a little more notice of just how far the egrets and ibis were wading out into the bay...but we didn't and it wasn't long before we were beached! Thinking we could probably drag the kayaks over what we assumed to be a small sand bar we ended up dragging them for quite a way - doing the sting-ray-shuffle the whole time in hopes we'd disturb any of the very-common locals before treading on them. I swear the pelicans were laughing their heads off at us.