I knew trying this during school holidays might add to the difficulty, but thought that given it wasn't a brilliantly hot day (high was 25ºC), and that the water quality in the bay was noted to be poor I might be able to do it.

The idea was to walk the length of all the piers of the Mornington Peninsula in one day, that's 9 piers, in total it's a little above 5 kilometres.

The plan was to start at Mornington Pier, then go across the Peninsula to Hastings Pier, then Flinders Pier, then down to Portsea Pier; Sorrento Pier; Blairgowrie Pier; Rye Pier; Rosebud Pier and Dromana Pier.

I didn't quite get to that unfortunately.

I started in Mornington, the Enterprize sailing ship was moored at the pier. It was a nice walk out there, some people fishing, families walking along. I never really thought about it, but a pier is a nice easily accessible place for people with limited mobility to go out to.

Parking was easy enough, although it was starting to fill up when I arrived. I parked around the corner from the Rocks, opposite the fence of the yacht club.

The drive out to Hastings too was uneventful, Mornington-Tyabb Road hardly being busy around 11:30 am.

Hastings Pier was kinda the highlight of the day for me. Easy to park, the pier has a nice length, you feel like you're out in Westernport Bay, without a really long walk out there. There's lots of nonchalant seagulls around on the small beach.

There's mangroves beside the pier.

The vista out into the bay is a mixture of bay and hard industrial of the various industrial plants that are across the bay.

It was also the most quiet pier of all of them that I saw today.

There's also a cafe opposite the pier.

The drive out to Flinders was the the fastest I would be able to drive all day, it was also the longest I would be able to drive without encountering stopped traffic.

Flinders was surprisingly busy, with a lot of people swimming, perhaps because of the water quality in Port Phillip Bay.

It was quite windy as I walked out to the end of Flinders Pier.

The drive to Portsea was long, longer than I expected it to be. Looking at a map you don't really expect it to be a long way. But it's long with several roads that seem to have been dropped from 90 or 100 down to 80.

I had Google Maps open on Carplay and there was lots of roads marked in red.

The worst was getting through Sorrento, where there was the roundabout at the end of the town where people were just doing U-turns, and I needed to go straight through it.

Portsea was nice, quieter, you can tell it's 'old money' in that area of the Peninsula, somewhat understated. Lots of properties with gates across their driveways.

Parking in Portsea was at first seemed like it'd be difficult as there's no a lot of parking, but there was parking opposite / across the street from the pier and a large ute was leaving just as I was arriving.

Queenscliff ferry terminal (seen from Portsea pier)

Walking towards the pier the first thing that I encountered were the large sandbags on the right as you walked towards the pier. They seemed to be placed to hold the shoreline together, they were...not exactly pretty but a sign of an attempt to control the sea.

There were many people swimming at Portsea off of the pier, seemingly unconcerned with the poor water quality in the bay as a result of the floods. Or perhaps they didn't care.

There were also many divers on the pier or just leaving.

Walking along the length of the pier gave me a chance (with my longer zoom camera) to look around the bay. On the other side of the bay I saw an odd structure that I couldn't work out what it was. It was only upon looking at the photos more clearly I realised it was the Queenscliff ferry terminal on the other side of the bay.

The drive to Sorrento was slower than I expected, but actually getting to the pier wasn't that hard, the bad traffic was closer into the Sorrento shops. I was able to get a parking spot pretty easily nearby.

The pier beside the ferry terminal was short, but nice enough to walk along, the Queenscliff ferry was just departing as I was walking along the ferry.

It was only as I was driving away from Sorrento did I realised there was a second Sorrento piers, the one beside the ferry terminal and then a second one. And then looking into it as I write this up there's actually three. Sorrento Pier, Sorrento Long Pier and the pier next to the Sorrento Sailing Couta Boat Club.

Blairgowrie was my first proper mistake. I'd been using Google Maps for navigation and had just been putting <NAME> Pier in and touching the first result as there couldn't be two, unless it was like Sorrento.

But with Blairgowrie it sent me down to the car park next to the Blairgowrie Yacht Squadron area instead of the top car park. I think I could have walked through the sailing club's premises to the pier but there was a security person around and I just didn't feel like engaging. I decided to just go back out and park at the top car park.

Blairgowrie was also the first pier where my shoes touched sand before stepping on the pier. It's also, because the top car park is at road level and the pier is obviously at sea level there's a set of quite narrow stairs leading down to the pier, this is the least accessible pier on the Peninsula.

Blairgowrie, with its sailing club and everything also has a marina with lots of vessels moored. There were many expensive-looking vessels in the marina.

Despite looking long on Google Earth and it is, you can't walk along the lateral arm, that's blocked off, it's just straight down and turn around.

After Blairgowrie I had intended to stop at Rye, but I struggled to find some parking, and there were a lot of people around, as it neared 3:30 pm, and while I pondered parking in the trailer parking area, where there was parking, it was more of a walk to the pier. And at this point the temperature was creeping up, and I was more tired than I expected to be, my patience was also wearing a little bit.

*Radiance* and *Hooligan Soup* at Blairgowrie

Then I drove to the pier parking area and did one...not loop as some of it just goes to a dead end...it was at that point that I decided to cut my losses and stop there. I suspected that if Rye was busy then Rosebud and Dromana would also be.

I count this as 'attempt 1' of walking all the piers on the Mornington Peninsula. In hindsight perhaps it was ambitious to try and do this in the summer and during public holidays.

I'll attempt this again, perhaps in the autumn or the maybe the winter, when it's quieter, colder and there's less people around.

Finally I've also been trying to capture things in different ways, with my iPhone, a Panasonic Lumix camera with a x30 zoom and also a camera that takes Instax film - it's like a Polaroid but less expensive film.