Well that was spooky
Boiling in the mist
July 2010
We have been having a pretty good summer so far and so I have been pottering backwards and forwards to the local beach.
I can fit at least one trip in a week with my visits to see my neighbour Guy in his brand new Hospice at Rue - they were only moved in at the end of June and the place is marvellous. Nice rooms with flat screen Tvs, en suite bathrooms - with showers - and special beds that if you get the wrong sequence of buttons probably fold you neatly like a shirt and pop you in the drawer.
From Rue it is only another ten or so kilometres to the coast so it is no great diversion to make my visits and bake immediately afterwards.
As the holiday season starts to get into full swing Quend Plage becomes almost lively and the surveyed zone gets very crowded.
Thankfully though it doesn't have an enormous amount to offer the wealthy holiday maker so most of those go elsewhere leaving the beach for the locals.
Out of the family zone you can have as much space as you want if you are prepared to walk a bit. At high tide there is still a narrow band of sand available whilst once the tide is out you have four or five hundred metres to reach the shore again. A lot of folks just give the sand time to dry out in the sun and then move with the water.
The beach is sandy and almost flat. At the low tide edge there are Bouchots: mussel beds. The mussels actually start minuscule on strings laid out on beds. As they get bigger they are transferred to the poles.
There must be a fair amount of wasteage because thousands seem to be washed out with each tide, which explains the happy campers with their buckets following the tide.
The weather has been a bit odd at times and the other afternoon you could see a sea mist rolling down the beach from the north. It suddenly went quite grey and the fishermen's vehicles in front of me became lost to view.
It was all quite eerie.
And then the sun forced its way through and we got a clear blue afternoon again.
When the wind is coming in from the right direction we not only get people out flying their kites but also people para-gliding up and down on the thermals over the dunes. You don't hear them coming at all so you need to be a bit carefull before suddenly deciding to stand up.
The other afternoon the wind was quite strong but slowly died away leaving the aviators having to gather their parachutes up, climb the beach and attempt a relaunch. After a while they realised that the day's sport was over.
Watching the kites plummet into the ground was a good indicator as far as I was concerned, but it would probably have been akin to telling a golfer that he was playing in snow, to explain to these guys that it would be quicker to walk back to base.
See also