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Narrow Neck is the name of anisthmus that separates theanabranch of theNerang River from theCoral Sea27°59′11″S153°25′47″E / 27.9865°S 153.4297°E /-27.9865; 153.4297 (Narrow Neck) in theCity of Gold Coast,Queensland, Australia.[1] It is also the boundary between the southern end of the suburb ofMain Beach and the northern end of the suburb ofSurfers Paradise.[2]
The highway connectingSydney toBrisbane was constructed at Narrow Neck in 1920 and by 1921 it became necessary to build theGold Coast's firstseawall out of timber. A series of seawalls were constructed at Narrow Neck over the years including materials like car bodies, old trucks and buses filled with concrete, dumped concrete from old buildings, rocks and boulders.[citation needed]
After an evaluation of seawalls along the Gold Coast by Griffith Centre for Coastal Management based at Griffith University on the Gold Coast, the timber wall was upgraded in 2016 by City of Gold Coast using the standard rock seawall design for the Gold Coast. Much of the timber removed was still in good condition.[citation needed]
In 1971 the Dutch University Delft completed a report for theQueensland Government recommending the construction of agroyne at Narrow Neck. TheGold Coast City Council examined the idea of a groyne and instead constructed anartificial reef to stabilise the foreshore at Narrow Neck. So far the reef has worked well as a coastal control point, but has been disappointing in its secondary objective to improvesurfing. A surprising benefit of the Narrow Neck Reef has been its ability to attract marine growth and reef fish and is now a populardiving andfishing location. Narrow Neck is particularly popular forkite surfing andlongboarding.
The 350 × 600 m V-shaped artificial reef is located 200 m offshore and deflects the waves to the left and to the right of its tip. It was built from more than 400 "mega sand containers" placed between 1 and 10 m below the mean sea level. Each container was about 20 m long and 3.0–4.8 m in diameter; it was filled with up to 250 m3 of sand and weighed up to 500 tonnes. Its walls were made of needle-punched nonwovengeotextile, which offered much higher damage resistance compared to conventional materials. The containers were filled on the shore and installed at a rate of up to 10 per day with a GPS-positioned ship.[3]
In June 2018, renewal works were completed in which 84 additional mega sand containers were place on top of the reef from a split hull barge.[4]
