Whitmore Point forms the northern entrance to the Gascoyne River and the beginning of beach WA 1430, which trends to the north for 6.5 km to Miaboolya Creek mouth. This is the first beach to receive sand moving northwards from the river mouth area and as a consequence varies considerable though time. The beach is backed by a 1 km wide series of beach-foredune ridges, which have evolved from episodic recurved spits moving northward and merging onto the shore. At anyone time one to three elongate spits up to 2 km long may be moving along the shore. The outer spits are fronted by 1 km wide ridged sand flats, while mangroves fill the inter-spit swales. The spits dominate the first 3 km of the beach and usually become welded to the shore along the northern 3 km where they manifest as northward migrating sand waves. Because of the backing mangrove wetlands there is no vehicle access to the shore. Miaboolya Creek drains a 200 ha area of salt flats and mangroves and crosses the shore as a narrow, shallow tidal creek. As the beach trends to the north then northwest a transformation takes place in the beach and arrangement of the sediments. The wide beach-foredune ridge plain narrows to 1 km, 15 km up the beach and is replaced by vegetated north-trending longwalled parabolics extending 2-5 m inland and rising to 20-30 m. The parabolics occupy the remaining 14 km of the beach, including the active 200 ha Bejaling Sandpatch (Fig. 4.327), and continue on into beach WA 1432. Parts of the central section of dunes are transgressing onto the southern shores of Lake MacLeod, the largest coastal salt lake in Australia. There are additional access tracks to the beach across the foredune plain and though the dunes from the southern end of Lake Macleod. read more

Beach Length: 6.5km