sovay | And deregulate the couple at the bottom end

The very first thing that happened when I climbed over the huge barnacle-scaled chunks of granite and weathered pilings that form the breakwater at the western edge of Corporation Beach was that I saw a seal: sleek, dulse-dark, bobbing its head in the waves not more than two breakers offshore. It looked at me. I sang it the seal-calling song learned from Jean Redpath. If I had just spent the afternoon till sunset sitting on the breakwater and watching the tide come in serpentine-green under thick foam and burst into spray that showered me to the shoulders of my coat, it would have been a wonderful time.

Because my digital camera is really most sincerely old, I could not get the picture I wanted of the kind of sea-cave inside the breakwater where the pilings are just as encrusted with barnacles and periwinkles and slipper shells and dead man's fingers as the surrounding stones, but it was still striking from the dryer side.

The view to the northwest.

The view to the southeast.

The view out to sea or, the one that mattered.

I love the alluvian fans of sandy beaches and the plank suggested a shipwreck, which I doubt was its origin.

I almost certainly first encountered the story of the whaling captain and the mermaid he met in the stomach of a crook-jawed whale in the form of Anne Malcolmson's Captain Ichabod Paddock: Whaler of Nantucket (1970) because it was much later than elementary school that I read Josef Berger, but either way it ends with a significant image of seaweed of which this assemblage reminded me.

The seagull seemed very foursquare about its spot.

I can't remember ever before noticing the private stairs that can be pulled back above the height of a storm-surge like a drawbridge or a gangway. The most nautical one was made of metal, like a ship's catwalk.

I have nothing especial to justify this shot, I just liked its light and sea, which was about eight degrees warmer than the air. Of course I went into it.

There was another field of barnacle-skinned boulders at the other end of the beach.

They looked spectacular in the last of the sunset.

Which was itself doing its best to be a special effect.

It took a few tries for the camera to recognize that I was trying to catch the light through the amber-colored bead of quartz that I picked off the shore, but it finally got the idea when I lined it up with the sun.

I was windblown and windburned and could no longer feel most of my fingers and was very happy, floodlit by sunset by the sea.

The last good shot of the waves before the light went.

Being now officially unemployed after an internal ten and really fifteen years at the same job and having Robert Carlyle on my mind, I should probably just rewatch The Full Monty (1997). Tomorrow I plan on a salt marsh.

Threaded | Flat

Oh, look at the sea, look at the light, look at the swimming to be done. Of course you went in! (Gonif.)

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What glorious pictures! I love especially the alluvial fans with the plank of wood and the things that look like footprints walking toward it, though the sun through the quartz and the magnificently busy sea in the last photo are close on its heels. I'm glad you got in, I love the pink on you in the portrait, and I'm happy you'll get a salt marsh tomorrow!