We arrived just as the day began to bring its warmth, crossed a wide green lawn under old trees, past a beautiful playground already busy with kiddies, and found ourselves drawn towards a low building on the rocks. Shelly Beach Pavilion, as the lettering above its columns reads, has stood there since the 1930s, cream and yellow, with the stepped lines of its era and a row of square columns framing the sea, and it still does the job it was built for: showers, shade and somewhere to change before a swim. Its story belongs to the people who live here. Early last century locals cut and cleared a swimming hole out of the rock platform themselves, daring for its day because women and men swam in it together, and in the 1930s local hands built up the walls into the pool you can swim in today, part of a wave of public works that gave coastal towns their baths and their pavilions. Pavilion and pool came out of the same years. Nothing about it is grand. That is rather the point.

Shelly Beach Pavilion, Cronulla, its yellow columns framing the sea
Shelly Beach Pavilion. Photo: Oliver Strewe.

After sitting a while in the warm rays, I saw a lovely group fresh out of the water and asked them the only question that mattered: what lives in Shelly Park Ocean Pool, and is it worth a dip? Three pairs of eyes lit up. Lucy and friends swim here as the Shelly Ocean Swimmers, or, as they sign themselves, the Shelly Ocean (and rock pool) Swimmers, and they have been in this water together since the end of 2013. Filming came a little later, with cheap Aldi cameras around 2015 and Olympus underwater cameras not long after that, and eleven years of it now sits on a wonderful YouTube channel, around 1,100 films, with a playlist called Shelly Pool Marine Life gathering thirty nine. Oldest is titled Our Pets in the Shelly Rock Pool. Newest went up this week. For about eight years they have been adding what they find to iNaturalist as well. I was full of beans by then, Olympus TG7 in hand, and decided to be brave in the chilly September water. I was not disappointed. I saw the biggest sea hare I believe I have ever seen, just fabulous.

What the three of them have filmed in one small pool reads like a reef list: an octopus they came to call Pete, a southern reef squid, a blue swimmer crab, a hermit crab, a dusky flathead settling into the sand, painted sweetlips, a lemon butterflyfish, a ringscale threefin, a baby brown sabretooth blenny, a larval eel, feather duster worms opening like flowers, anemones, a blue nudibranch, and night after night of torchlit snorkels to see what changes after dark. Naturalists logging sightings at Shelly Beach and the reef just outside the wall fill in the rest of the neighbourhood. Research grade records there include common Sydney octopus, Sydney sea hares, eastern blue groper, white ear and girdled scalyfin, herring cale, old wife, dusky flathead, elephant snails, snakeskin chitons, carpet sea stars, waratah anemones and wandering sea anemones, Neptune's necklace along the rock, and nearly three hundred nudibranch records, among them the black margined nudibranch and Bennett's hypselodoris. Port Jackson sharks, wobbegongs, banjo rays and eagle rays cruise the sand a little further out, and a green sea turtle turns up now and then.

Asteromenia, a red alga with round umbrella shaped blades, growing in Shelly Park Ocean Pool
Asteromenia, a red alga with round umbrella shaped blades, one of the rarer residents of the pool. Photo: Lucy, Shelly Ocean Swimmers.

Joy is the word for the rest of it. People wading, children playing in the sand, swimmers doing slow deliberate laps to take in all the beauty of the morning and say hello to their ocean friends. Shelly Park is a true haven for a thriving community in and out of the water, and I felt very blessed to run into people so passionate about nature and about protecting the marine life living alongside us. Thank you, Lucy and friends, for the encouragement to jump in and explore. Shelly Park sits at the end of Ewos Parade on the Cronulla peninsula, the pool is free and open to everyone, and it is about thirty metres across and roughly a metre and a half deep, so you wade in off the sand rather than diving. Take a snorkel and a slow pace around the pool, and see how much is living right there beside us.

An Earth to Sea News original. Films and pool knowledge by Lucy and friends of the Shelly Ocean Swimmers. Species records from iNaturalist research grade observations at Shelly Beach, Cronulla. Pool and pavilion details from Sutherland Shire Council and ocean pool records. Photograph: Oliver Strewe, gifted to Earth to Sea News.