We visited Apollo Bay for the Melbourne Cup long weekend. On Monday we decided to walk to Shelly Beach. We started right from our Airbnb place at Apollo Bay.
We walked on the Great Ocean Walk trail along the Great Ocean Road first. After crossing the Barham River we went down to the beach.
We continued and walked on the rocks after Marengo beach.
We didn’t see any suitable passage back to the trail so we kept walking on a couple more beaches. Eventually we reached a cliff with rocks very close to the ocean. It was not safe to go through them and we didn’t want to go back all the way to Marengo beach.
We decided to scramble up the cliff and try to find our way to the trail there. The trail was close but it was thick and thorny bush between us and the trail. My wife told us that she couldn’t go back down the cliff so we slowly moved through the bush.
We were fortunate to avoid blackberry and surprised some people on the trail emerging from the bush.
Views from the top were excellent.
From time to time the trail would go down to the beach.
We reached the Shelly beach picnic area and had lunch there. We saw 3 koalas up in the trees. Unfortunately they were too high for a good shot (I mean photo shot, of course).
We walked on the Great Ocean Walk trail to the Elliot River crossing. There we turned north and walked on the rocks towards Shelly beach.
This is where I realised my mistake of not checking the tide. It was high tide and there was not much space on the rocks making moving forward difficult.
At one point a sudden wave caught me and my wife so we got drenched from the waist.
We walked on the Shelly beach and further until we reached more rocks. We met 3 girls that told us it would be hard to reach the next passage from the beach to the trail. They also told us that the high tide left them stranded on a beach for 2 hours.
That’s when we decided to go back to Shelly beach and go back to the trail there.
We had enough beach walking for the day so we returned on the trail.
Overall it was a great day walk. We walked 19.4 km total. It took us 6 hours.
We finished the day with excellent dinner at the Apollo Bay Fishermen’s Co-Op.
This walk on the Trail Navigator Victoria: Apollo Bay to Shelly Beach