Beach Life in Winter

After visiting the friendly seals, we took in what was a bit of a nostalgia trip for my stepfather as we made our way along the coastal resorts of the Lincs coast on a bright but freezing day.

The beaches were huge, sandy and presumably because it was winter, clean. But the resorts are mainly awful, with horrific mock casinos polluting the seafronts as councils have let any idea of sensible planning and design fly out of the window. Mablethorpe and Chapel St Leonards are particularly horrific. Skegness, which always has a bad reputation, is actually a nice town where the amusement arcades are at least pleasant tat, and development much more restrained.

Even on a cold day, there were still enough people there to justify having the ice cream and doughnut stalls open.

Sutton on Sea beach, the one south of the actual resort by the golf course, was our family's favourite. Lots of beach anglers catching the odd whiting, and the welcome sight of a couple of tiny, white bellied sanderling skittering along the waters edge feeding.

Lines of shells marked various tide lines, some beauties amongst them, and lots of edible crab remains too for some reason.

We had a lovely day.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 09.12.19

The Seals of Donna Nook

When you go to a nature reserve in quest of a certain species, you expect it to be difficult. You expect to have to cover a lot of ground while being super stealthy in order to catch a glimpse of something a long way away, and produce a blurry "record shot" of the creature involved.

Donna Nook is completely counter intuitive to that. In order to find a seal, you merely park, ascend a short track over the dune, and the bloody things are literally sleeping right under your nose in their hundreds, making no attempt to move away from the crowds.

The pups are entirely unprotected by their parents, who seem to spend their time further away doing big belly slides on the mud while occasionally chasing after each other in a desultory fashion. Apparently they understand the fence, and what its for, and any human jumping over is subject to immediate attack, which I would not fancy being on the end of.

Amongst these huge inert bodies, there were lots of small brown wading birds that I couldn't identify, but these birds were not the reason why it was the busiest nature reserve I've ever been to.

No everyone was here to see the seals, the easiest wildlife experience possible, these largely immobile sacks of blubber in many colours.

Wonderful things.

Si

All text and images copyright CreamCrackeredNature 08.12.19

The Bottomless Lake

Memories of Crete again today, prompted by visitations into my mind of this...

Lake Volusemni, the so called "Bottomless Lake" by Artimy Pavlov, Wikimedia Commons

...The Bottomless Lake.

The Bottomless Lake lives in the Cretan holiday resort of Aghios Nikolaus, and the above view is one I've never had of it. I was usually found, on the two family holidays we had in the area, sitting with my dinky little yellow and black fishing rod just where the short canal joining the lake to the harbour enters the lake.

The Bottomless Lake isn't really bottomless. Some boring English nautical fellow took a sounding and found the depth as being around 60 metres. Which is still incredibly impressive for a body of water that my memory reckons is no larger than a football pitch, but destroys the local legend somewhat. You can imagine the bottomless lake as being an entrance to Hades, where evil souls are tortured with deathless drowning before emerging into endless fires and the mocking laughter of the three headed dog Cerberus.

Sisyphus and Damocles look up from their own ordeals only briefly to look the newcomer in the eye with knowing sympathy.

I fished in the Bottomless Lake. Not at the bottom, I didn't even have 60 metres of line on my reel, just four lead shot and a piece of bread on a hook. On an earlier holiday in Elounda along the coast I had fished for grey mullet with some success, although I caught only small ones. They still went down very well fried with lime juice, although my stepfather in his own display of Underworld cruelty made me bone and gut them myself.

Much bigger mullet lived in the Bottomless Lake, as long as my arm or so. But you could never get them within a mile of a fishing hook, and indeed here I never caught any mullet at all, or any of the saddleback bream that were also common in Cretan waters, I only caught those gloppy bug eyed little rock gobies and blennies, ugly, slimy Marty Feldmans of the sea.

But from what I remember, you wouldn't want to eat any of the fish from these waters in any case. The long sea front of the resort used to have a tidal sweep of used toilet paper about a mile long that the windsurfers used to hurtle through in a frenetic cholera death wish. And then the harbour was full of bluey oil slicks from the Playboy cruisers and rusting ferries, deep and cold sea urchin waters somehow far scarier to me than invisible bottom of the Bottomless Lake.

It was about our only Hotel holiday that one, and in the fog of increasing years, not as good as I thought it was at the time. I never swam in the sea or played with other kids on beaches made scary by the local hornets.

It was all sit down meals and swimming in the rooftop pool, a gloomy pit of Weil's Disease that surely one day must have featured in a "That's Life" story about holiday drownings.

I'd rather have swum in the Bottomless Lake, and met the fate of Titans.

Si

Words are copyright CreamCrackeredNature, image as credited