Storms reek havoc on West Coast of New Zealand.....

The weather here in New Zealand over the past few weeks has been unbelievable. I have never experienced such high winds - between 100 - 120kmh, heavy squalls with sleet, hail and heavy, heavy rain. For 10 days it was unrelentless, our house shook constantly from the high winds.
With the winds coming in from the West, it meant that our local beach was pounded with the high seas.
As much as I wanted to go down to see how the beach was faring, I decided that it wasn't a good idea for safety reasons.

By last weekend the storm had passed, and on Sunday we ventured down to the beach to see how things were looking. And I must say, the wind and the high seas have changed the face of our beach forever....

 In January this year, this little sand dune was a favourite place for Lucca to play in, he had so much fun running up and down in the sand, now it is only half the size it was, and there is no seagrass at all.

 This seaweed has been caught up on the fence line from the force of the waves. The seaweed is hanging on the top of the wire fence, the sand has blown up so high it has almost reached the top. This is just on the other side of Lucca's sand dune and is probably the sand from his dune...

 

This shell encrusted piece of driftwood was washed up on the beach too...

But the saddest sight of all were the hundreds of sea birds, Prions, that have been blown onto the beach, some caught in the high seas with no way to survive and have drowned.

I hope that it is a very long time before they are subjected to anything like this again.

 The link below is a news story talking about what is being called the "Seabird Wreck", although it is talking about New Plymouth , a West Coast city hundreds of miles from us, the birds were blown up the whole of the West Coast of the North Island.


 http://www.sott.net/articles/show/231952-New-Zealand-Storms-create-seabird-wreck-