A WHALE OF A TALE

It’s pretty obvious by all of the Coastal Art Maps that I produce that I love where the land and water meet. The ever-changing aspects of the coastline never cease to amaze and delight me. And a big part of these places are beaches. Hence, it should come as no surprise that beach-combing is something I like to do quite a lot. Walking the places I map and observing everything that the sea delivers is never boring. One of the more fascinating finds we’ve had over the years is the discovery of bones, specifically cow bones, which were once raised around the turn of the last century on our island to provide fresh milk and then slaughtered and barged back to the mainland for processing. Some of these parts never made it and have been tossing around in the surf ever since. We have found and collected hundreds of these pieces; some just “nuggets” and others complete femurs, shoulders, jaws, vertebrae, etc. Some people find this a bit creepy, but mostly it is just fascinating, as they are more like abstract sculpture and a bit like finding dinosaurs. This has been part of our routine for some 30 years. With this as a backdrop, this past August during some type of reported “swell” originating in South Africa and traveling across the Atlantic over 10+ days and resulting in very large and dramatic surf conditions, we were having an early morning walk-and-swim and we espied something very peculiar looking rolling at the shoreline. What could it be? The bone-collector’s find of a lifetime? It turned out to be a Whale Bone! It looks like a major vertebrae and does not appear to have been attached to a living whale in a long time. It was comically fantastic. Just carrying it over a mile home seemed like a bit of beachcombing penance. But it was worth the effort. A true coastal souvenir reward.