Skywatch - Singing Beach

Singing Beach, Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA December 23, 2008

The big beach in my home town is called Singing Beach. It's named because the sand squeaks when you walk on it. Tuesday was such a beautiful day that Leon and I decided on a stroll on the beach. With all the storms we have had this week, the beach at low tide is one of the few places where you can walk without trudging through the snow. I got some nice pictures for Skywatch.

Seaside icicles on Eaglehead Rock


Looking east towards Gloucester
Kettle Island is visible to the right


Looking east down the length of Singing Beach
This close to the solstice, it's almost sunset at 3 PM.

See all of Skywatch here.

Minus Tide

White Beach

With apologies for title theft from the Dharma Bums. Leon and I are in my hometown of Manchester-by-the-Sea, Massachusetts to spend Christmas with my family. The beach is a 10-minute walk from Dad's house. Today, we had the lowest tide that I have ever observed there, so we went for a walk. The culprit, as usual, was a full moon. The new moon will have a similar effect, but this was really an outrageously low tide.

Moonrise over Kettle Cove. Source of the very low tide.

We walked along the rocks, which were covered with bladderwrack (Fucus sp.), making them very slippery. I went down fairly hard once. We poked around the tide pools. Tide pools in southern New England are pretty boring. We don't see the interesting invertebrates that Bev, Robin Andrea, and Dave have recently posted. The algae does make the rocks brightly colored, and we did see a few things like slipper shells.

Danger! Very slippery Fucus-covered rocks!

Orange algae on the tidepool rocks contrasts with green algae on a
slipper shell (Crepidula fornicata). Aren't scientific names fun?

The low tide followed an extremely high tide last night. This combination left lots of beach to walk on. You could almost forget that just above the high tide line there's a foot and a half of snow on the ground. The contrast made for some interesting snowy coast scenes. I spent a lot of time here as a kid, swimming, fishing, and mucking around in the same tide pools that I now consider boring.

Snow on Fisherman's Rocks. I caught a whole bunch of
Atlantic mackerel there when I was a kid.

We walked over to the next inlet, Kettle Cove. At dead low tide, a sandbar often forms in the middle of the cove. You can wade out to it through waist-deep water. Today, the sandbar filled the entire cove. You could have waded to it through water that was no more than ankle deep (though utterfly frigid).

Kettle Cove. The lowest tide I have ever seen there.

Light and camera batteries began failing so we returned to the car. Sunset suggested that the weather tomorrow should be nice- "red sky at night, sailors' delight."