Sharks and Pasties!

Wow, what a start to the day. We have just stood at our kitchen window and watched three basking sharks close to shore just off Cape Cornwall. As we studied them through our binocs, one of them jumped completely out of the water and then repeated it twice more over the next 5 minutes. Immediately rang Rohan Holt, a good marine biologist friend of ours who shared our excitement and re-assured us that yes they do completely broach, possibly as a way of removing parasites from their bodies. I just wish I hadn’t sold my 70-300mm DO lens last week!!! Then, from the sitting room window I watched a huge buzzard lift off from the field in from of us with a large looking piece of prey grasped in it’s talons, riding the eddies in the valley like an old fashioned carousel! The weather is dull but natural events quite far from!

Today was a wet day so after the best pasties in the world from the Porthlevan bakery! I spent a whole afternoon in a Falmouth Café drinking coffee, meeting up with my school-friend Vivian, who I haven’t seen since …… school! Sun is just coming out now so I am going to dust off the camera again and check out the Pendennis Headland for photographic opportunities !

Today I Stroked a Mullet

Untitled image/ Work in Progress
© Copyright Glyn Davies 2009
No copying or re-use of this image OR text, is permitted by any means, or in any media, including web use.

Spent almost the whole day on the most amazing beach in the whole world, well maybe not the whole world but certainly my known world! Towering granite cliffs rise magnificently from golden sands with a an ancient settlement on a promontory creating the renowned backdrop of Logan Rock. At low tide lagoons are left behind, crystal clear every time and an iridescent blue-jade colour, shimmering in the sunlight and like a kaleidoscope, cast refraction patterns on the sand just below.

This is a beach only accessible by a steep cliff path and some rock scrambling to get onto the sand itself. It is a beach where you can cast off all your clothes, as close to a natural paradise as I can imagine, made even more so by the lack of windbreaks, rubber rings, wetsuits and other rather contemporary paraphernalia associated with main beaches. Anyway, dressed only in a snorkel and mask! I swam out around the cliffs and into a sunlit gully with a tiny beach at the far end. As I entered the gully a large mullet was VERY slowly meandering ahead of me at surface level. Using gentle kicks of my feet only, I followed the fish into the shallows and realising I was behind, it turned into a dead end pool and just stopped there! I reached out my hand and stroked it’s back, then again, with it making no sudden moves to escape, only when I tried to actually lift it out of the water did it quite rightly decide to shift up a gear and exit the pool!

Once again my new camera carrying bag, the Lightwave 40 proved it’s worth! It’s a fair walk to this beach and is made decidedly more hard work when carrying a hundred weight of kit. Today, even with cameras, 1.5 litres of water, towels, spare clothes, sun creams and even pasties, it made lightish work of the whole experience, SUCH a difference from the heavy old Nature Trekker. Having said that, I miss the ease of access of such a fold open system where lenses and filters are almost instantly to nah and don’t need to be packed into individual neoprene Zing cases, but overall, the journeys themselves are just so much more pleasant so until I find something else, the lightweight rucksack system is winning for distance or duration walks.

On returning home, accompanied by a watery sunset, we were looking out of the apartment window and even from a distance could make out the fins of a basking shark. We rushed down to the cliffs armed with binocs and watched this amazing creature meander to and fro in the deep sea just 30 foot from the cliffs. I could get over how defined the serrated rear fin appeared, like some sort of ancient axe! Even as we headed back in the semi darkness the shark continued it’s hunt.

Pasties & Big Holes!

Today was a Penzance day, well mostly. We wandered around the harbour before the heavens opened and we were engulfed by torrential rain! We sheltered in someone’s doorway whilst the rain bounced back up off the ground and then just as quickly as it arrived, it was gone. The sun came out and the streets glistened, rooftops became huge mirrors contrasting against the retreating dark clouds. We walked up past the wonderful Turk’s Head and the famous Admiral Benbow eating houses and on into a now baking hot Market Jew Street. This was our first pasty day. We stood on the high granite walled pavement overlooking the main street and watched the world go by as we happily munched on a very large and a medium traditional steak pasty! Simply GORGEOUS! We went back to the apartment overlooking the wild and dramatic Cape Cornwall and I actually fell asleep listening to the sounds of the sea! It may be the sudden relaxation of getting away from the gallery for a few days, it may have been all the driving I’ve been doing, or it may just be that I am getting older and like generations before me, need my forty winks J When I woke, we decided to go for a walk across the cliffs to Kenidjack Castle and then towards the Geevor tin mines at Pendeen. The weather was now stunning, still towering cumulonimbus every so often but not one drop of rain. We walked from Cape Cornwall Northwards, along a beautiful, flower edged footpath and down into a river valley, lush with vegetation and bathed in late afternoon sunlight. A small Iris strewn pool shimmered as we found our way along it’s Eastern side. We then climbed steeply up to Kenidjack Castle which really wasn’t much to look at as it’s not really a castle at all but enjoyed brilliant views of the twin engine houses of Botallack perched precariously on non existent ledges just above sea level, facing the full force of the Atlantic weather systems. Today however was just a bit too sunny and the sea too calm to justify a serious photographs of such an incredible place. The light was rapidly becoming more exciting, lower, warmer and richer. We dropped down a steep hillside with mine shafts all about, and into a derelict industrial area at the bottom of the valley overlooking a huge granite boulder strewn beach with Cape Cornwall behind. A stream wound down the valley and tumbled across the boulders towards the sea. As is more often the case these days, I had carried the Manfrotto tripod with me the whole way. Ironically I only used this for one photograph at this point, to convey a sense of movement in the river near my feet but not slow enough to ruin the waves breaking on the sea beyond. I am really not into really long exposures where water ends up looking like mist, I have never understood this need to ruin the natural wonder of the patterns and movements in water. I hope others will agree with the gentle but honest balance within this image. As the light was now diminishing rapidly, I decided to find a short cut back up to the road – hmmm! What started out as an apparent footpath turned into a fight through bracken, brambles and ferns up a horrendous scratch of a route, almost certainly past mine shafts, judging by the gentle hollows of foliage on either side L At one point I was having to literally pull Carol up walls and boulders and I have never seen such stinging nettle blisters as Carol’s, on exiting the undergrowth! I was glad we found the road before nightfall but I have to say it was a stupid course of action considering the heavily mined nature of the hillsides. I won’t be repeating that exercise again and next time will take the longer but safer cliff path!

Finished off with a well earned G&T or two!