Signs advertise the bowlo's courtesy bus is running seven days. If you wear the right tint of sunnies, you can kid yourself the sky looks blue.

But everything is not right at the coast.

At the real estate agency where we pick up our keys, the agent tells us there's been "heaps'' of cancellations.

At the rental house a few streets back from the beach we're greeted by a dead bat near the driveway. The lawn's littered with burnt leaves, which also form a black blanket down where the stormwater meets the beach.

On a browny-grey morning, the sea and the sky almost blend into one. On the Mollymook shoreline joggers disappear into smoke haze and sea mist. Dolphins play in the surf.

Out for an early morning swim is Laura Scicluna, a Canberran staying at Ulladulla. She's there with Ron Allen, a former Canberran - now a happy Queenslander. He's wearing Broncos shorts but it's too chilly for him to get them wet.

Laura came the long way via Brown Mountain. Her sister tried the Princes Highway on Thursday and was stuck on the side of the road until 2.30am when the road reopened.

READ MORE:

While Ron and Laura have only been here a couple of days, the ease of getting around roads and supermarket aisles tells a sad story.

"The coast is suffering, it's definitely more quiet," Laura says. "They have one shot in the year at doing well."

Up behind the surf club, there's a carpark that normally has a line of campervans filled with sleeping backpackers. It's almost empty.

The caravans there now belong to the local Lions Club setting up their Sunday market.

Club secretary Allan McDonald is happy with the number of stallholders who've been able to get there for the monthly market. But he's worried about the impact of the fires on the community he joined in retirement. A former Canberra firie and Braidwood farmer, he doubts there'll be enough recovery money to go around.

"I'm anticipating if we have a very poor summer here, we'll have a few more businesses close come the end of the financial year. You can bet on that," he says.

While Allan is talking, a stallholder comes up to ask if she can please plug into power. Her property between Braidwood and Majors Creek has been wiped out by fire and so practicalities like charging her eftpos machine are proving hard.

She fights back tears telling how she'd tried to salvage a nice Christmas for her kids, but she doubts how well she managed it. Setting up her jewellery stall is "my therapy", she says.

Some of the talk around the markets is whether the New Year's Eve fireworks should go ahead. Some are vexed by the suggestion they shouldn't, and there's anger from one man at the mayor's social media post calling them a waste.

The money's already been spent, he says, and why shouldn't fire-fatigued communities along the coast have something cheerful to help bring in the New Year?

Stallholder Mark Warwick has already made a couple of sales. He lives near Batemans Bay and has spent time in an evacuation centre in the past few weeks when fire came hard for Bawley Point.

The Kings Highway closure has made the Bay feel dead, he says. His daughter has lost shifts at her supermarket job. A shelf-packing crew was sent home the day before because a delivery truck couldn't get through. The night before at the club was the quietest he's seen on a Saturday night.

"People are going to hurt through this,'' he says. "[But] we'll all come out of it, I guess, and look back and go 'shit was that five years ago'."

Back down at the beach, a surf boat crew launches out into the surf. It's coloured pink by the dull, glowing sun up above, matching their speedos. They row out to train like every Sunday morning. But today they have this strange coloured water almost all to themselves.