Named after a ship that ran aground in 1931 My experience in the pool As you walk along the southern edge of Long Bay to get to Malabar Rock Pool you first pass signposts warning of snakes being seen in the area and then a ‘pool wildlife’ board with images of various marine life from tiddlers to stingrays via Port Jackson Sharks (don’t worry, these are not lethal and don’t get bigger than about 1.5m long, though thankfully there were none in the pool when I got in). Actually, although the pool was teaming with fish, they were very small, and the only other marine life I came across was a wobbly bit of now-deceased jelly fish. There was quite a lot of debris, though, along the wall on the cliff side of the pool: clumps of seaweed, sheets of paper and a few other bits of stuff I chose not to look at too closely. An elderly east European-sounding couple advised me to walk around the perimeter wall of the pool and enter via the wide steps with handrail on the ocean side. It was sound advice, although I had to choose my moment as the waves can come rushing in at that point and I didn’t fancy entering the water bum first. None of the other locals who joined me in the pool after I’d started swimming had my qualms about the detritus by the cliff side of the pool, so I was probably fussing about nothing. Still, I kept to east-west laps, criss-crossing occasionally with one of the locals who was swimming north-south. I don’t think it’s a pool where people hold too strongly to lane etiquette; well, they’d struggle to anyway because the pool floor has no lanes and is very uneven, with areas where seaweed flows like long hair in the wind, and other bits where the rocks make it unsteady to stand. In fact much of the pool is too deep to stand in anyway. A handy plaque by one set of steps tells us that the water reaches 1m90 in depth when the pool is full. It’s probably about 33m long and a bit less wide. It was overcast as I swam, but the sun came out almost as soon as I was finished, and the sunshine was met with a chorus of kookaburras sitting in a tree not far from the pool edge. Getting there, getting in, getting changed There is a car park just above the pool. There are also regular buses stopping right by the pool. Number 299 goes from Circular Quay to Little Bay past Malabar. There’s a very good ramp making wheelchair access pretty easy, though that also meant a warning sign for the ‘submerged rail’ down at the bottom of the ramp. There are vertical metal stairs at the western end, or the wide steps I took with handrail on the ocean side, though you’d need to be careful on these at high tide. There is a … Continue reading Malabar Rock Pool – Malabar, NSW 2036