Deranged Photography Contest - Take me to the Beach!! (Set of photos)

This is my entry into the Amateur photography division of #derangedphotography Deranged Photography Contest run by @derangedvisions. The theme this week is 'Take me to the Beach!!'.

Welcome to Kingscliff, a stunning coastal town found just south of Tweed Heads in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, Australia. It's a reasonably quiet beach side community that is home to about 7,500 people. In the holiday seasons it jumps significantly as there is lot of holiday accommodation in the area.

For us this is our breakfast pit stop when we're travelling south. Most weekends we try and travel over the border, we're mostly picking up food supplies from farm stalls and looking at land in the area. If we leave early, a stop in at Kingscliff is perfect as they have great park and BBQ facilities right along the beach.

On this particular day my husband already had the BBQ fired up and the bacon and eggs were smelling divine. I had set the table ready to eat and while waiting I took the kids down to the beach to have a look as the sun was rising. As we were walking down the path, it looked different... the tide was a lot higher than usual and the waves looked different. It wasn't until I got closer that I realised the entire beach was covered in sea foam, I had never seen anything like this before!! We had recently had some rough weather but never did I expect to see anything like this! Suddenly I was is sea foam delight and I completely forgot about breakfast. I had my camera in hand so I was off and clicking : )

To the left it was sunny, fine and bright. The sky was bright blue, the glow of the sun was highlighting the grasses in the dunes and the shapes and formations of the sea foam. The ocean was full of sea foam, it was difficult to see the water for the sea foam. As the waves came in the tide would bring more sea foam in and take some out leaving the shoreline looking different after every wave.

The sea salt was also really strong in the air, so strong that you couldn't see the horizon at times. I've never seen it so heavy before.

To the right it was looking cloudy and overcast, like bad weather could be possible. It wasn't sunny and golden at all but somewhat dull and full of pastel colours. You could see the detail in the foam a lot more. The foam appeared to be thicker but I'm sure that was more due to lighting. Watching the waves roll in was quite hypnotic. The waves wouldn't roll in as they usually would but instead the foam would come in fast as a wall of foam, once they became to high they would fold and tumble together with the movement of the water.

We headed back up for breakfast (reluctantly). After breakfast we all headed back down again. It was still good weather to the left but the right was looking a lot worse with dark storm clouds rolling in but the sun was still shining which was highlighting all the beach.

As we were leaving the kids and I had a wave chase us out, it was full of foam and had a lot of momentum behind it, this wave was coming in a lot higher than all the others had. Once I realised it was coming for us, I said to the kids, "RUN, keep running"! I managed to take a few photos as I was running from it. Foam was flying through the air but it quickly reseeded back. The kids thought it was great and became a highlight of their morning. We had to run a good 10-15 meters to avoid it, it kept us on our toes and we have several laughs about it afterwards.

So why did this happen? We had recently had a freak weather system where most of the south coast of Australia had massive amounts of rain drop on it in a short space of time. A low-pressure trough developed into an east coast low, which is an intense low-pressure system. But this hit at the same time as a king tide and it was this that made things really bad. It was bad enough that airports were closed, mass flooding occurred which saw ten's of thousands of people evacuated right along the QLD/NSW coast line.