After the January gale: the strandline from the top down
A westerly gale blew through on the Thursday night, gusting hard enough to rattle the letterbox, and I waited until Saturday to go down. The morning after a storm is tempting, but the waves are still reaching the top of the beach and half of what has come ashore is being taken back out. Two days later the sea had settled, the tide was falling, and the sandy bay had three clear lines of wrack running along it at different heights.
The highest line, right against the foot of the dunes, was the storm’s own. It was mostly kelp torn from the lower shore, the long stalks still attached to their holdfasts, which look like small tangled roots and are worth teasing apart over the tray. Out of one holdfast the size of my fist came two brittlestars, a scatter of tiny mussels and a red worm I could not name. Below it ran a thinner line from the last high tide, and below that a fresh, wet one where the water had only just been.
I walk a strandline slowly from one end of the bay to the other, the top line on the way out and the lower ones on the way back. The count for this walk:
- Twenty-three egg cases, the ones called mermaid’s purses: seventeen small ones with curling tendrils at the corners and six larger ones with short stiff horns.
- Eleven cuttlebones, the biggest a little longer than my hand.
- One sea potato, the papery shell of a burrowing urchin, unbroken for once.
- A pale ball of empty whelk egg capsules, as light as a dry sponge.
The less pleasant count was plastic. I marked out a square of the top line about forty centimetres across, with a shell at each corner, and picked out the small round pellets that wash in by the thousand after a blow. There were forty-one inside that one square. I also cut free a knot of orange rope that had wrapped itself around a lump of driftwood and carried it home for the bin.
What I left was the wrack itself, which feeds the sandhoppers and flies and, through them, the birds working the line. Three common starfish in the fresh line were still curling their arms, so I carried them down to the water in a wet glove. I do not know whether that helped, but it cost nothing. Next time I will bring a ruler for the egg cases and soak a few in a bowl overnight, because they plump up and become much easier to tell apart.