Summer means its time to visit the beach

With summer fast approaching the Northern Hemisphere this means its time to visit the beach for many of my readers. I know quite a few headed in that direction last weekend for US Memorial Weekend. Do you live close enough that a visit to the coast is a possible weekend or holiday destination? Do you have a favourite beach?

My special beach is Colac Bay, on New Zealand’s southern coast. This is where I grew up and had a wonderful childhood.  It’s a beautiful secluded bay. Our house was a little way from the beach but we could still hear the waves and smell the salt air.

The sea played a big part in my early life. The beach was my playground. My school was directly across the road and from September until end of March (our spring/summer) PE sessions were always swimming. Money was tight for my widowed mother so we augmented our food supply with shellfish gathered at new and full moons, flounders, and whitebait in season.

The sea didn’t only provide food. After a storm we’d drag seaweed home to dig into our garden. Mum had the greenest fingers, she could grow almost anything, I guess helped by the “fertilizer” she used.

Biking to school each day, you’d never know what the sea would look like. Would it be calm with barely a ripple, or would there be crashing waves. Would porpoises be playing beyond the surf or would the area be black with muttonbirds driving food into the shallows.

What do you do at the beach today? Is it different from how you behaved on beach visits in the past?

And I’ve just got to ask this – how many of you leave your phone at home or in the car? Please don’t tell me it accompanies you onto the beach!