Skipping at the beach

First beach walk of the year yesterday for Georgie, Joe and me.

Yes, I’m sure you’ve seen this view before, but it never gets old, does it?

Georgie was very excited to get back into the water.

A while ago, someone in something I was watching was skipping stones on water. Immediate flashback to my granddad teaching me how to do this when I was a child. I was never great at it, but once upon a time I could get at least two or three skips out of a stone. Of course, to do that you need flat stones, something this particular beach doesn’t really offer. Still, after I had one (unsuccessful) go, Joe was keen to get in on the act.

Turns out he’s very good at it. Even with far-from-ideal stones, he regularly got at least three, sometimes four skips and even a five!

Whatever knack I once upon a time had seems to have abandoned me. Most of my stones went straight to the bottom. I did manage a couple of twos. Okay, one of those twos was actually a stone going straight to the bottom, hitting another stone and bouncing back up, but the other one was a genuine skip.

After the stone skipping and ball throwing it was time to wander down the beach to check out the starfish situation.Bit alarming and very sad that the only sign of any I could find at first was one limb.

Are they called “limbs”? Well, you know what I mean.

Fortunately, more were spotted further along.

Nowhere near the numbers there were a decade ago before a wasting disease came close to wiping them out. For a couple of years you were lucky if you spotted a single one (reason the “limb” was so alarming), but they do seem to be slowly bouncing back.

Some random photos just because.