Artistic Effects of the Sydney Fires 1994

Fires around Sydney. Help I'm burning!

Just kidding.

The suburb (Dee Why) I live in is mainly small concrete apartment buildings. Not too much fire danger here. However, the smoke from the other bush land locations going up in flames has filled large parts of the sky with smoke. I've seen some interesting visual effects.

• Two bands of high altitude smoke starting from the fires in the west stretching over Dee Why Beach, the ocean and over the horizon looked like there was a fire on the ocean.
• The sun and the full moon looked blood red through the smoke.
• On Sunday ashes from the fire washed up onto the beach. This left interesting black lines outlining the latest high water marks along the beach. From some angles and distances this had an arty look to it. The location of the lines would change from wave to wave.

The same wind from the west that pushed the fires from the blue Mountains into the city suburbs also provided an excellent off shore breeze giving excellent shape to the coincidentally larger than usual swell. Both factors combining to form excellent surfing conditions which I have been doing my best to exploit on my new Manta Extreme Comp body board.