A new activity for the challenge. Beach combing! We find a lot of broken trees and develop a side interest in fossils.
Sunday 2 February, Cloudy. 8°C
My mum came up with this one and I’m wondering why on earth we’ve never done it before. She remembered her dad doing it on rare summer holidays in her childhood. B is keen at the idea. I’m delighted to have an idea to do at low tide. I’m low on those and the tides by us are pretty extreme so we get long hours of mud flats to negotiate.
I’m wary arriving at the beach. I’m trying frantically to remember if I’ve seen much washed up before which is going to satisfy B’s quest for treasure. We’re on the Bristol channel and I suspect we get less than more open coasts. I needn’t have worried. We find huge bits of broken off tree and lots of seaweed scattering the whole beach. Clearly the recent storms have brought a lot in.
B is off straight away. I find the sole of a shoe (minus the rest) and another smaller one right next to it. She finds what looks like half a surf board. We skirt the things that look more like rubbish (we’ve not brought the grabber and are picking things up and examining). Big pieces of plastic and a broken wooden pallet are explored. Then B find a massive metal sheet that seems to have been blown all the way up the beach. Tree trunks and concrete slabs (probably permanent residents) are found too.
B starts a sideline of trying to find fossils. We’re rubbish with this. We live on what I know is a great fossil beach but wouldn’t recognise one if it bit us on the nose. I’m going to fix this this year. I’m planning to ask my cousin for a tutorial when we see him at Easter. In the meantime I’m relying on B’s ‘expertise’.
B: It’s easy. You find a stone that looks like it might have a fossil in it and throw it down hard to break it open. Then you see if there’s one inside…
No idea if there is any accuracy to this but it’s fun… if potentially dangerous. I find a rock with a fabulous layer of what looks like crystal through and it cracks into 4, revealing more sparkle, to both our satisfaction. We try others but without better results.
Then we get cold. My hands are freezing. B needs the loo. We need to make our 333 for the day though. I was going to try and do it out of anything we’d ‘combed’ but the massive piles of seaweed are too good to miss.
Looking forward to repeating this challenge in some other locations over the course of the year. It’s definitely got lots of potential!
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