Yallingup Sunset: Canal Rocks, Sugarloaf Rock, or Smiths Beach?

People always ask me which one. Honest answer: it depends on the swell, the cloud cover, and how many other people you want to share it with.

I've been watching the sun drop into the Indian Ocean off this stretch of coast since 1982. I still walk down to one of them most evenings I'm not in the workshop late. The three you'll get pointed at (Canal Rocks, Sugarloaf, Smiths) are all within half an hour of my front door on Blythe Rd, give or take. They're not interchangeable. Each one wants a different sort of night.

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

So instead of ranking them, let me tell you what each one is for.

Canal Rocks is the spot people gravitate to first because it's the most photogenic on the map. Granite tumbled into the sea, a footbridge across a channel, water pushing through gaps in the rock. On a still evening it's pretty. On a six-foot swell it's something else entirely.

The light here lands sideways across the granite about twenty minutes before the sun actually hits the horizon. That's the moment to be there: not the sunset itself, but the lead-up, when the rock is glowing and the water in the channel is going from blue to gold. Turn up at sunset proper, you've missed half of it.

Park in the main car park and take the path down. Don't cross the footbridge straight away. Walk south first along the rocks for fifty metres or so. You'll get a better angle on the channel with the sun behind it. The bridge itself is the obvious shot, but the view from the rocks looking back at the bridge is the better one.

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

Canal Rocks gets a crowd. Always has. But the crowd moves around. Most people stay near the car park and the bridge. Walk a hundred metres in either direction and you've usually got your own bit of granite to sit on.

When to come here: big swell, scattered cloud, southwesterly. Skip it when it's dead flat. Canal Rocks needs water moving to come alive.

the Canal Rocks sunset guide

Sugarloaf is twelve minutes north on the Cape Naturaliste road. Sea stack rising out of the water, viewing platform on the headland, and a horizon that goes uninterrupted to the curve of the earth.

This is the one I send people to when the cloud is breaking up after rain. You want clean air for Sugarloaf: the rock is the foreground, the ocean is the middle, and the whole point is the depth of the view. When the air is washed out the photographs are flat. When it's been raining all afternoon and a band of clear sky opens up on the western horizon, get to Sugarloaf fast.

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

The viewing platform is built well. You can stand there for the full hour without needing to move. There's a track down to the rocks below to get closer, but I'd argue the platform is the right elevation. From down on the rocks you lose the line of the headland.

In whale season (September through November mostly) Sugarloaf becomes something else again. Humpbacks track this coast on the way south, and you'll see them from the platform without needing binoculars. A spout, then a back, then a tail. That's not a sunset thing exactly, but timed for late afternoon you can get both in the same hour.

When to come here: clear horizon, calm wind, no haze. Skip it on a brown smoky afternoon. Sugarloaf doesn't work without depth.

how Sugarloaf works at sunset

Smiths is where I go. That's the short answer.

It's not the most dramatic of the three. There's no granite arch, no sea stack, no photographic gimmick. It's just a beach: a long curve of sand with a headland at the southern end and the open ocean to the west. The sun drops straight into the water from there, depending on the time of year. No obstruction. No fuss.

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

What makes Smiths the right call for an actual sunset, as opposed to a photograph of a sunset, is that you can walk. The beach is long enough that you can be there for forty minutes and never stand still. Tide out, you've got firm sand all the way to the southern headland. Tide in, you're up on the soft stuff with the dune grass at your back.

I bring visitors here when they want quiet. Canal Rocks is performance; Sugarloaf is a vista; Smiths is just an evening. There's a difference.

The car park fills up but the beach absorbs people. By the time you've walked five minutes south you won't see anyone. The sound of the surf does the rest.

Some mornings you walk down there and the light on the water is something a piece of timber can only aspire to. The evenings are the same.

When to come here: every other night. Smiths is the default.

the Smiths Beach write-up

Here for one sunset only:

The gallery on Blythe Rd closes at 5pm most days, earlier in winter. Planning a sunset, come past the workshop on your way through. You can see what I'm working on before the light goes, then carry on to whichever spot suits the evening. Most of the year the timing works.

The workshop sits between the northern sunsets (Sugarloaf, Cape Naturaliste) and the southern ones (Canal Rocks, Smiths). It's a natural stop on the way. Come past, then carry on west.

I've been doing this a long time, and the sunsets I remember best aren't the ones I photographed. They're the ones where I sat down on a piece of granite or a log of driftwood and let the half-hour happen.

That's the thing nobody tells you about sunsets here. The best ones aren't the brightest. They're the ones where you stop looking for the moment and just let the light go.

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

With time for two evenings, do two different ones. Canal Rocks one night, Smiths the next. The contrast will tell you more about the coast than either one alone.

With time for a morning as well, Eagle Bay at dawn is the other half of the conversation. Same coast, opposite light, half the people. my beach rankings for the area

That's the honest answer.