Too rough for peas.

Earlier this week a four legged caterpillar tracked mobile platform trundled onto the beach along with it's operators, route clearers, wood support layers, arm wavers, cigarette smokers, gatherers, scrapers, sweepers and collectors, phone operators, lorry drivers and fillers, crew bus occupants and driver.

After an hour or two the process of manicuring the palms began. A man in much Health & Safety wear accompanied by a pair of chainsaws attached to the platform rails ascended and began to remove most of the palm fronds and all of the date clusters. From a once homogeneous mess of interlocking noisy palm fronds we were left, eventually with palm trees exuding about half a dozen palm fronds pointing vertically upwards. And silence. Once the interaction betwixt adjacent palm fronds was removed silence reigned.

This morning the small clusters of fronds were each leaning north at right angles to the palms of their birth.

This was a clue. Further clues lay in the surf, for surf it was and the spray being whipped from the breaking crests and hurtled sideways along the wavefront as it clattered ashore.

The biggest clue of all was the boats. They were still moored up.

Now, far be it from me to cast aspersions but I wouldn't have said that the sea state was exactly poor as the late and sadly missed Geoff Ingram once remarked when asked what the weather was like he said it was "too rough for peas" which as far as understatements go was up there with the most understated example of the genre.

So I guess a few whitecaps and a steady 4-5 occ.6 (?) S-ly constitutes a poor day.

Not for us, though.

It was still over 20C all day and if I'd had peas they'd have stayed on my plate, no problem.





Besides, three boats went out so we had some landings to watch  .......