Contrasting beaches at the Neck

If you stand at the neck on Bruny Island, you can see two long sweeping sections of coast on either side.

To the East, the Adventure Bay side is the Neck Beach, which opens to Adventure Bay.

This is an ocean environment, is open to storms, and is therefore a very mobile beach that moves about all the time, is less prone to erosion as it is used to big waves, and is much less productive in terms of foods for wildlife than the western side.

It has relatively coarse sand, compared to the west, and is more mobile - sands come and sands go.

Here you’ve got very low storm waves and disturbance which is mainly just wind driven. Its much more prone to erosion than the ocean side, so you’re getting that difference. Simpsons Bay has built up a lot of sand with the low water energy, and that means that sand doesn’t move at all, so you’ve got this amazing benthic fauna (organisms that inhabit the seafloor), with invertebrates (an animal that lacks a backbone), shellfish, a whole range of life forms. If you explored down a metre into that sand and silt and put it under a microscope, what you would see would be an incredible diversity of life. That rich, stable sandy environment rich with life goes out for probably two to three hundred metres. And the fact that Simpson’s point comes out to the Western end of Simpsons Bay, makes it an even larger area of rich stable shallow productive coastal waters. It has fine sand, and is very very stable, except for when you get high winds from the South-West.