Blood moon and bloody tired

When shortly before 3 a.m. the alarm clock rang, I took the camera and the binocular and went into the garden. The weather was great and the sky looked as if it were alive with all the stars one could see up there (this was one of the moments when I am truly grateful for the fact that Hastings is such a relatively small town, meaning there is not so much light pollution here). I seated myself in a rocking chair and spent the next one and a half hour or so out there in the dark.

Luckily, it was only when the moon's usual bright white light returned that I realised how cold it actually was.

Great British Beach Clean 2015

The day before yesterday, on Saturday, I went to Birling Gap near Eastbourne to take part in the Great British Beach Clean event, organised by the Marine Conservation Society, that was held there. Birling Gap, the hamlet that is in the process of vanishing due to coastal erosion, is situated between the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head ans thus attracts a high number of visitors. This in turn means that, although it may appear beautiful at first sight, there is usually also a lot of rubbish to be found on the beach.

The area our group, consisting of approximately 15 people or so, cleaned was not exactly huge (we went along the red line in the picture below) as it was more important to clean a relative small beach section properly than to go over a bigger area and do only a half-hearted job. We were, however, advised to stay away from the edge of the cliff - although quite a lot of rubbish was lying around there - due to safety concerns.

After about an hour of picking up rubbish this is what we got:

And we still did not manage to collect everything lying around, not just because some of  the rubbish was too close to the cliff edge but also because it was very easy to overlook especially the smaller pieces (e.g. sweet wrappers) between the stones and pebbles. So, even if a number of other people had already covered a certain area, you could still find something that had escaped their eyes.

For the Beach Clean event today on Monday, at Rock-a-Nore in Hastings, we were a much smaller group (six people) and the pile of rubbish found on the beach was smaller as well - but still about 6 kg in toto. The things we picked up there were for the most pasrt small bits: plastic bottle caps, lollopop sticks, sweet wrappers, pieces of nets and strings.

Finds at the beach

When I went for a walk on the beach at Hastings yesterday, I came across a few bunches of seaweed. So, I took a closer look and found what I had been hoping for: egg cases (also known as mermaid's purse). I do not know to which shark species the egg cases belonged to, but could be catsharks maybe.

Although some of them were already empty (the pale ones), they were entwined with those where the sharks have not hatched yet. One can actually see the yolk and embryo very clearly inside one of the egg cases (second picture). Anyway, I could not take the egg cases home with me, so instead I returned them to the sea in order to protect them from drying out.

  

Less pleasant, however, was the finding of a number of fishing lines, complete with fishhooks and shiny bait (little plastic fish) and some sort of a weight (the oval grey piece at the bottom) which I all found on a short beach section at the most eastern end of the beach.

Since I almost always carry a pair of simple garden gloves with me for reasons like that, I picked the fishing lines and hooks up and disposed of them. It was not that long ago that I was able to witness how potentially deadly these things can be when a seagull mistook the bait for food and got entangled in the fishing line with the hook through its beak. The seagull was lucky though, thanks to some beach goers who freed it, but it was still a horrible sight.

All in the all, the beach at Hastings is place where one can always find all kinds of litter lying around. Not a place I would recommend to people with children.