Tomorrow, Western Australia’s west coast is expected to experience a “once in ten years” storm event, with winds that could gust to 130 kilometres per hour.
Today’s photo shows a much gentler day in a beautiful south coastal WA place, but it still shows how wind – especially salt-bearing wind – shapes, sculpts and prunes.
Musically, today’s venues are in Tokyo and Bahia.
(photo copyright Doug Spencer, taken at 4.34 pm on 17 September 2017)
Pictured is one of Bremer Bay’s many fine beaches.
Bremer Bay, a little over 500 kilometres southeast of Perth and 180 kilometres east of Albany, has a permanent population of just a few hundred.
Come summer holiday season, however, it is temporary “home” to thousands, and since the “discovery” that a particular spot in the waters of the Bremer Canyon hosts a seasonal feeding frenzy each summer, tourists now take day trips out into the ocean to see the orcas, aka “killer whales”.
Spring is really the best time, most especially because Bremer Bay sits within one of the world’s most botanically remarkable regions.
Bremer Bay is a convenient base for day trips into the western end of Fitzgerald River National Park.
(as regular readers already know, Fitzgerald River National Park is one of my favourite places, period. To Mediterranean climate flowering plants, it is as Etosha, Kruger, the Okavango or the Serengeti are to African animals)
South of the township, jutting into the Southern Ocean, is a peninsula, variously known as the Point Henry Peninsula, the Bremer Peninsula, or simply “the peninsula”.
The pictured beach is on the peninsula’s eastern side, a little closer to Point Henry than to the town, but still just a few minutes drive from anywhere in the town.
A general rule when driving along a major road that is anywhere near the south coast of Western Australia: whenever you see a road/track off the highway which will take you to the ocean or to an inlet, take it!
(subject, of course, to your vehicle’s capability, your driving ability, and the current condition of the road/track)
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The Wind is a much-covered tune, composed circa 1953 by pianist Russ Freeman; some have added lyrics to it, including the one I rate as likely the world’s worst/shallowest of allegedly “good/great/iconic” singers.
Her travesty did, however, handsomely boost Russ Freeman’s income.
Click here for the tune’s life and times.
Less lucrative, but far more rewarding, musically, was Keith Jarrett’s embrace of The Wind as one of his preferred encores.
This is how he played it in Tokyo on 14 April 1987:
O Vente (The Wind) is also a song authored and originally sung by Dorival Caymmi (1914-2008)
(see also #51 in the “a shining moment” series).
Caymmi was born and raised in the coastal city of Salvador, the largest city in Bahia, Brazil.
Many of Caymmi’s songs refer to the sea, and to those who depend on it.
Salvador resident Sidney Rocharte marked the centenary of Caymmi’s birth by making a little film – shot locally – to complement Caymmi’s own version of O Vento.
Rocharte also provided this partial translation:
…and thank you to the friend who alerted me to this video’s existence.