The Story of Strickland Bay, Australia
Strickland Bay — “Stricko’s” — is a limestone reef on the southern side of Rottnest Island, Wadjemup, eighteen kilometres off Fremantle. Because the island sits on the outer shelf, clear of the reef ridges that shelter Perth’s beaches, the bay takes Southern Ocean groundswell almost undiminished: a heavy left with a barrel take-off, long walls and a shallow end section, and a shorter right that shuts down in size. Surfers reached it in the early 1970s; the world tour reached it once, in May 2021, in the most unlikely Championship Tour stop the sport has ever staged.
The Search Comes to Wadjemup
Surfers had been crossing to Rottnest since the mid-1950s, but the reef at Strickland Bay was not ridden until the early 1970s, a chapter told in the short documentary Strickland Bay Surfing Pioneers. The island’s club, Rottnest Offshore Boardriders, has since put hundreds of volunteer hours into dune fencing and paths at the bay, and the wave is regularly described as one of the best in south-west Western Australia. What it had never hosted was the world tour — until 2021, when pandemic quarantine bubbles could be guaranteed in New South Wales and Western Australia but not in Victoria or Queensland. Bells Beach and Snapper Rocks were dropped; Newcastle, Narrabeen and Rottnest were added.
The Rip Curl Rottnest Search ran from 16 to 26 May 2021, reviving the roving “Search” format that had taken the tour to Réunion, Barra de la Cruz, Arica, Puerto Rico and San Francisco between 2005 and 2011. It was broadcast-only, with no spectators at the bay to limit the impact on the reserve, and it opened with a Welcome to Country and smoking ceremony led by Whadjuk Noongar Elder Professor Lenny Collard. A shark sighting paused a heat on day two. On finals day, 25 May — the biggest surf of the waiting period — Gabriel Medina, who had won the last Search event in San Francisco at seventeen, beat Morgan Cibilic 15.50 to 7.87 for his sixteenth tour win, and Sally Fitzgibbons beat Johanne Defay 15.24 to 11.23 for her twelfth.
Ferry, Bicycle, West End
Rottnest lies about eighteen kilometres west of Fremantle. Three operators run ferries: from Fremantle’s B-Shed and Rous Head the crossing takes about thirty minutes, from Perth’s Barrack Street Jetty down the Swan River about ninety, and from Hillarys Boat Harbour north of the city. They land at the main jetty in Thomson Bay, the island’s settlement, a few hundred metres from the visitor centre. Private cars are prohibited: visitors move by bicycle, on foot, or on the Island Explorer hop-on-hop-off bus that loops nineteen stops around the island. Hire bikes — ordinary and electric — can be booked with the ferry so one is waiting on the jetty.
The island has twenty-two kilometres of sealed cycle trail over generally flat ground with a few hills. Strickland Bay sits on the southern side of the narrow isthmus toward the west end — about eight kilometres from the Thomson Bay jetty by the south-coast road past Salmon Bay, twenty to thirty-five minutes on a hire bike with a board, or bus stop 10 on Digby Drive at the bay’s north-east corner. There is no drinking water or food outside the Thomson Bay and Geordie Bay settlements, so carry both. Beyond the bay the road continues to Cape Vlamingh at the island’s western tip, where the Perth Canyon drops away about twenty kilometres offshore.
Limestone, Quokkas and the Leeuwin Current
Wadjemup means “place across the water where the spirits are” in Whadjuk Noongar; the island was part of the mainland until rising seas cut it off about seven thousand years ago, and it remains a place of deep spiritual significance. The Dutch navigator Willem de Vlamingh named it Rottenest, “rats’ nest”, in 1696 after mistaking its quokkas for rats. Between 1838 and 1931 the colonial government ran an Aboriginal prison here in which some 3,600 to 4,000 Aboriginal men and boys from across the state were held and at least 373 died — the largest deaths-in-custody site in Australia — and the Aboriginal-led Wadjemup Project, launched in 2020, is working on acknowledgement and commemoration. The island became an A-class reserve in 1917.
Rottnest is a remnant dunefield of late-Pleistocene Tamala Limestone — wind-blown shell and quartz sand turned to rock — with minor coral-reef limestone dated to about 132,000 years ago, fringed by shallow shore platforms cut into the dune limestone. Those platforms are the surf reefs. Nineteen square kilometres, eleven kilometres long, with salt lakes in the interior and a 45-metre lighthouse hill, the island holds the world’s largest wild quokka population, an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 animals, because it has no foxes, cats or dogs. Offshore, the warm Leeuwin Current runs south along the 200-metre contour and is why the southernmost Pocillopora coral survives at 32 degrees south, protected in the Parker Point sanctuary; the water runs about 18–19°C in winter and 23°C in summer. Sea lions haul out on Green Island, humpbacks pass on migration, and the Perth Canyon to the west is a pygmy blue whale feeding ground. Sharks are a listed hazard here as across Western Australia — check SharkSmart before paddling out.