Gales and Storms

As I write this, a gale is raging outside.  I don't know if it is the tail end of Doris and or new one - maybe Edna or Elizabeth or Eileen.  Whatever the name it is music to my beach combing ears since last week, after Doris, I ventured forth in two days of epic beach combing which gave me the following finds. 

Ballydowane has been almost devoid of flotsam for weeks but when I got there last Friday it was visible in a line across the beach.  Shingle that had been removed was returned in different places and all the usual locations of flotsam were empty whilst in places where usually nothing washes in were cartons, balloons and a host of other plastic paraphernalia that has the unlikely effect of making my blood course excitedly through my veins.  An hour later, walking back down the beach loaded up with oil barrels and milk cartons, I was still excited and looked like a happy, pink-cheeked beach tramp.

The next day I went to Clonea via Ballyvoile.  The 'back beach', as I call it, at Clonea is quite inaccessible but gets the best treasures.  Again no disappointment but by the end dismay at the sheer amount of things washed in.  Almost all human garbage is there.  By far the most numerous were lids and shotgun wads.  There were 4 dead seals in total also, all missing their heads. 

Ballydowane Bagheera

Just before Christmas I came across a seal pup on Ballydowane.  He was at the far end of the beach, the dogs were sniffing him and I thought at first he was dead.  But he was very much alive, silver-furred and sleepy.  I had the number for the Seal Rescue in my phone and even more amazingly, I had my phone with me so I phoned them.  They said they needed photos so I took some, went home, emailed them off and put some rollers in my hair.  The Seal Rescue phoned me back and said he needing rescuing and that a man called Andrew Quinn from Waterford Animal Welfare would be there and could I show him where the beach and pup was.  So I took the rollers out of my hair and drove happily back out to Ballydowane, where the light was fading and just as it got properly dark, the stretchered seal pup was carried off the beach and into the rescue van.

The Rescue Centre phoned me the next day to tell me he had arrived and that he would be ok.  They called him Bagheera after the panther in Jungle Book which I thought was a very good name for a sleek and feisty seal pup.  Later, in the pupdate, I learned more and now he is safe and thriving, along with many other rescued pups, getting fat enough to take his chances again in the Celtic Sea.

A seal pup is just about the best thing I have ever found while beachcombing but I hope it doesn't happen again.    

New Year's Eve Combing

On the last day of 2016, I walked from Ballyvoile to the end of Clonea and this is what I found.

A Most Boring Beautiful Beach

Stradbally Cove is my 'home beach' in that it is closest to where I live but I hardly ever go there because it is so boring.  By boring I mean that hardly anything of interest ever washes in there, just the usual plastic bottles and cans and not many of those either.  There are some who might say this is a good thing, and of course they are right; one beach that is relatively little polluted is a rarity but that only means the pollution is somewhere else. 

For a plastic fanatic like me, whose gaze is used to peering among shingle and sand for synthetic colours and shapes, all this driftwood and pebbles and seaweed is just too much of a good thing.  The views are stunning and the big, flat sandy bay is perfect for many different outdoor pastimes and you have to park your car right at the start of the beach so there's not even a walk from the car park.  There's a picnic table and an information board and an old lime kiln and the tide comes in evenly and there's no way you could be cut off and there are no pendulous, overhanging bits of cliff to fall on you unless you venture into one of the washed out rock fissures and I don't think most visitors do.  They walk their labradors to the sea, turn round and come back.