Why are Moon Phases Important?

I've included a phases in the moon applet over on the right because the position of the moon, more particularly the alignment of the sun, moon &earth, has a big influence of the magnitude of our tides. We see these tides as a roughly twice daily rise & fall of the sea level. The so called spring tides, are not just limited to spring (or autumn), they occur roughly twice a month (as the graphic above shows) at either the new moon or the full moon. Other times of the month see lesser tidal range because the gravitational pulls are not aligned. You can get the predicted tide times from the Bureau of Meterology Website (Venus Bay tides are roughly the same time as for the Port Phillip Heads)

Venus Bay does get higher tides in spring and autumn that have a significant extra height due to strong ocean swells and waves. Sometimes these highs can be forced higher by a storm surge or strong on-shore winds.

So the new moon this weekend make it a candidate to see more erosion, possibly higher than last month.

Please Be Patient

I have begun transferring post from the old free NING site (which will be closed done at the end of the month, Not Happy NING!) to here. Where possible I want to have the same information and photos available here. However getting the photos across is very manual at the moment so I will be doing a few posts at a time.

Unless someone knows a magic way to automate this transfer?

What is the Creative Common Licence About?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Australia License.

You may be puzzled, why I have put a Creative Common Licence on this blog? This is a public viewable blog, so it is necessary to make it clear that the information and photos we are sharing here do still belong to the person sharing them and that they may be used and reproduced elsewhere only under a set of specific condition. If your works are used then the must include an attribution to yourself, and please note anyone reproducing things from here it is common courtesy to notify the person who posted or submitted a photo. They can not be used for commercial purposes and they must be shared in the same form (ie under the same CC licence). In other words if someone wants to use or copy your work claim "Fair Use" because it is published under in the "Public Domain" (ie on the internet) then that fair use does have specific limits! This is to protect those wanting to share their observation and work.

Even if you share a post or link to a photo from here, you are entitled to have a more limited CC licence for your work. For example Flickr supports CC licences and encourage their members to set them by default for your photostream but also lets you individual set licence and access to photos individually. Posting or linking from here does not override that licence.

Welcome

This is a new home for The VBOP project. It was formerly set up as a free NING group but unfortunately that will be closed down at the end of this month. So all the connect from there will be moved over to here (well most of it, everything t6hat is possible).

Also this site will be set up a little more opening than before, you don't have to join anything, you can post your observations elsewhere in the many Social Networks that make up WEB 2.0. This [place should be a convenient place for you to link to those places, post & photos.

This will also be a great place to find out what needs to be observed and how to record it

Drifting North Again

This panorama was taken at the beach 5 car park and shows how the sandbars are attached to the beach at the southern end (see this photo full size). You can also see the ruts developing into rip channels also point to a return to genrally northerly longshore drify