Every now and then, some idiot has to get rescued as they get stuck by the tide and end up perched on a cliff. I always think they should be made to wait there until the tide goes out rather than waste resources. Can't they read a tide chart?

But for a moment last week, we laughed and said hey, we could call a helicopter? To be fair, I can and did read the tide chart - it was going out, but not for a few hours. Walking along the beach from Aireys to Urquarts seemed do-able. We might have a few areas where we need to wade, but the sea was soft and there didn't seem to be any real danger.

We'd just done the clifftop walk and my nervous system was fried and I wanted to walk with barefoot on the sand.

We'd spent a while gazing from above, looking for whales and wondering whether the seaweed floating in the tidal pool below was actualy an octopus.

The first step was getting around what we call the Pirate Cave. It's a chanel of water cut through the rock to make a cave and you have to walk over the bridge to get to the next cove.

It's also pretty darn slippery over the clay when it's been raining like this day, so I felt safer with barefeet - I like to feel the surface underneath and grip with my toes. To get to the bridge we had to wait for the sets to pass and the water to flow out before we raced across. It was fairly deep so I actually took my jeans off. Lucky there was no one around as I wasn't wearing any knickers.

From there, we managed to get around the next two headlands. At this point I stopped taking photos as we were doing some pretty hairy rock scrambling with the risk of falling from some height or breaking our ankles on the rocks. Whilst I was pretty confident as I'd been rock hopping all my life, after my hip starting hurting I was getting pretty tired and was looking forward to getting dry in the car, which was only a kilometre away.

Except the next headland was impassable - there was too much water smashing against the rocks, and even if we waded we'd probably get swept against the cliff. Not a good idea. We debated waiting for the tide to recede more but it was a fairly high low and we would still have to wait an hour and a half. WE took shelter under some tea tree for a while wondering what to do. We hadn't brought snacks or water so decided to go back along the cliff top.

By this time I was really tired, so I went up to the closest carpark and waited in the rain for Jamie to run back to the first carpark and grab the car.

Luckily, no helicopters were called, though Jamie did make the ambulance noise as he came to pick me up.

This post was written for the Ocean Lovers community. The challenge numbre #5 was to describe your last beach walk.

With Love,

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