Very low tide

The other day, Tuesday I think, we had an incredibly low tide, the previous high tide must have been pretty high too as the line of seaweed and junk was right up by the sea wall. I've never seen such a low tide here in Ilfracombe. Apparently these huge variations between low and high tide are called spring tides, nothing to do with the season obviously but has to do with the sun adding it's influence to that of the moon, Check out the Wikipedia article.
Anyway the effect of this amazing low tide is to make stuff that is normally covered by water available to explore. I took loads of pictures:

This is a bed of kelp with the sea breaking over it, I've never seen it actually growing before, obviously it's usually well below the water.

These three are an amazing undercut slab of rock usually not accessible even at low tide unless you're a rock climber.

Normally you can't access the left side of Ilfracombe's Wilder beach, as it has lots of ribs of rock which are hard to climb over, there's a stream, the Wilder stream, which runs down the beach between the main part of the beach and this left hand side too. If I could have been bothered to take my shoes off I could have got further, the heavy rain in the previous week made the stream very fast and full.

I've wandered into some bits of this half of the beach occasionally at low tide, but I never find much in the way of sea glass there so I don't bother much.

Lovely clear pool with water trickling into it, there are several springs all over the beach so water runs down it at several points. Apologies for the annoying dates on the pics. I had to take some shots for an Ebay claim recently and forgot to switch the date off again.

After admiring our local beach we went to Woolacombe to visit a little beach called Barricane, this is a strange phenomenon, it's tucked into some sharp dramatic rocks towards Mortehoe and the beach is made up of shell fragments and shingle. Either side are broad sandy beaches, Woolacombe on the left and Coombesgate on the right. As the tide was so low it was possible to walk out of the end of Barricane and round into Coombesgate, trouble is we stayed too long and couldn't get back! This wasn't really a problem as obviously there's a perfectly good way to get off Coombesgate beach, only trouble is it's a whole lot of very high steps
oh well, good exercise!

Here's some pictures of the weird rock formations on these beaches.

View out of the end of Barricane

An atmospheric channel between Coombesgate beach and Barricane

A cathedral of rocks surrounding a deep pool.

I suspect most of these things are inaccessible in a normal tide.

Since these are supposed to be blogs about my craft stuff, here's some stuff I picked up that day, waiting to be turned into something nice. The little shiny black one at the front is a stone, I'd love to know what it is, it comes off the beach just like this, shiny and smooth.
There's at least one piece of genuine black glass, and the little pale blue piece, sort of squared off at the bottom of the picture, is the only piece I've ever found on Barricane.

These are some pieces I'm working on at the moment, I've been doing a lot of starting and not much finishing !

top is a piece of brown sea glass, I have very definite plans for the finishing of that one, next round clockwise is a piece of fossil coral, not sure where that's going yet, and last is a lovely piece of ceramic, I feel that a piece of lace is needed for this one, just haven't decided how or what kind yet.

Apologies for the uncropped images, still trying to getPphotoshop CS3 to work on my new computer. can't afford the newest one, who can!