Canal Rocks Sunset: The Complete Guide

Canal Rocks is twenty minutes up the coast from where I live, and I've never once arrived and been disappointed. That's a four-decade record on Blythe Rd.

Photo: Lasthib, CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

There are two or three places in Yallingup that I take every single visitor to, and Canal Rocks is one of them. It doesn't ask anything of you. You park, you walk a couple of minutes, and you're standing on granite that's been here since long before anything else around. The Indian Ocean does the work. You watch.

Canal Rocks sits about twenty minutes north of my workshop on Blythe Rd, signposted off Caves Road. The place is a series of granite outcrops, old hard rock, with narrow channels cut through them by the ocean. There's a small footbridge over the largest channel and you can stand on it and look straight down at the swell pushing through. On a big day, that's the show. On a still day, the water in the channels goes clear and you can see right down to the bottom.

It's part of the Leeuwin-Naturaliste National Park, looked after by DBCA. Free to enter. Open year-round. There's a small car park, a basic toilet block, and a track of perhaps two minutes from the car park to the bridge. That's all the infrastructure you need to know about. Everything else is rock and water.

Photo: Lasthib, CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

This is the thing nobody tells you. Arrive at sunset and you get fifteen minutes of light and then the show is over. Arrive an hour before and you get the whole arc. The gold coming in low across the water, the granite warming up, the channels lit from the side and then from underneath, and finally the moment when the colour drops out and the rock turns blue.

In summer that means being there around 6:30pm. In autumn, more like 5:30. In winter, somewhere around 4:30. The point isn't the clock; the point is giving yourself enough light to actually see the place.

The other thing about an hour before sunset is the crowds. The buses come at sunset. The tour groups come at sunset. The hour before is when the place is yours. By the time the rest of the world arrives, I'm usually walking back to the car.

People tend to stop at the bridge and call it done. The bridge is good. Stand on it for ten minutes, watch a few sets push through. But the better view is the southern platform. From the bridge, walk left along the granite (slowly, the rock is uneven and slippery when wet) until you're up on the higher shelf looking back at the channels. From there you get the depth, the layers, and the line of the coast running south toward Smiths Beach.

When there's a swell running and you can hear it before you see it, that's your signal to take the long way. Don't go down to the water. Stay up on the platform. The rocks here can take a wave clean over them when nobody's expecting it. There have been incidents over the years and they're always avoidable.

Photo: Stuart Sevastos, CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Picking between Canal Rocks and Sugarloaf Rock for a sunset and can only do one? Where to be at golden hour. They're both worth knowing. Sugarloaf is more dramatic and more exposed; Canal Rocks is closer to the water and more intimate. The Sugarloaf take covers the other in full.

Drive five minutes south and you're at Smiths Beach. By the time you get there the sky will still be doing things, and there's a chance the bay will be glassy if the wind dropped out at sunset.

Photo: David Stanley, CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Still got energy? My beach rankings for the area for the full sweep. Canal Rocks is one of six places worth knowing within twenty minutes' drive of the workshop. Smiths, Yallingup, Meelup, Eagle Bay, Bunker Bay, and Canal Rocks itself. Pick a different one for the morning and you'll have done the coast properly.

I'm not a photographer. I make tables. But I look at light for a living, and Canal Rocks at the right hour gives you the same thing a piece of good timber gives you under a spotlight: depth, edge, and warmth all at once.

For anyone shooting:

• Bring a polariser. The wet granite reflects badly without one. With one, you see down into the channels.
• Don't shoot at sunset. Shoot fifteen minutes before. The colour is on the rock, not the sky.
• Get low. The bridge view is the postcard. The view from down on the southern platform, lens just above the granite, is the photograph.
• Wait for the wave. A long exposure on the channel during a wave gives you the line. Water going somewhere with intent.

For background on the broader area, Tourism Western Australia covers it well.

On your way in from Caves Road, we're three minutes off the route on Blythe Rd. Come by the workshop while it's still light.

Google Maps sometimes misdirects via Wildwood Rd — stay on Caves Road, turn at the Carbunup store, then Blythe Rd. The gallery sign is on the right. Door open before sunset means I'm probably still at the bench. The gallery doesn't have a sunset to compete with — Canal Rocks does — so we close earlier in the day and let you have the evening for the coast.

The other thing I'd say: don't come to Canal Rocks once. Come twice. Once at sunset for the show, and once in the morning when the light's coming from the other side and the place feels twenty years older. The same rocks. A completely different photograph.

That's the whole thing, really. Twenty minutes up the coast, forty years of looking, and I'm still not finished with it.

Read next: Sugarloaf at golden hour.