Our bedroom is on the ground floor of our house – under the balcony – therefore ours is the closest room to the sea (hardly more than a skip, a jump and a hop, except that you’d have to skip down our steep garden, jump over the fence onto the railway lines and hop over the seawall!).
One of the wonderful things about living so close to the sea is that the view is ever changing; no sunrise is ever quite the same as another and every cloud and every wave is different. Sometimes I awaken and see a fishing boat chugging its way back to Cockwood Harbour, or there is a small boat by the buoys closer to shore – the fishermen are checking their nets and crab-pots; some mornings rowing boats are racing each other and quickly pass across our view, or perhaps a boat with a pretty white sail catches my eye before that boat, too, scuds off into another view to be seen from within someone else’s window frame. One day, years ago, I saw a lad in a kayak and I wanted to shout out, “Be careful of the sandbank and the rip by the river mouth”, but he was paddling too fast and was soon out of the frame…and out of earshot. Later that day he was in the frame, so to speak – there was a news report about a kayaker in trouble… I should have shouted…
My distance sight isn’t that great nowadays so when I rose from my bed and drew back the curtains a few days ago, and I looked out to sea and saw something looming on the horizon, I could hardly believe my eyes.
“It must be gigantic for me to be able to see it from this distance”, I thought.
But I couldn’t make out what it was – a trick of the light, surely, but no, there was something out there. What could be so huge? It appeared to be an oil rig though what an oil rig would be doing in Lyme Bay, Devon, I could not imagine. A short while later Chris took some photographs of the strange thing. Upon closer inspection Chris concluded that it was three enormous cranes on a barge, but they weren’t crossing the bay that day – they sat out in the bay for three days before disappearing. Strange! I guess that stranger things have happened at sea…
I guess those aliens thought they would arrive unobtrusively, cunningly disguised as a large crane barge! The only problem was that they had intended to make earthfall in the middle of Liverpool Docks, where they might possibly have looked right at home, but unfortunately their interplanetary satnav must have been playing up again.
We also saw these on the day we left you in Dawlish!! I said to Chris (my Chris) that they looked like a rig of some sort but I forgot to mention it to you or point them out to him before we left and thus forgot all about it/thought maybe I had imagined it! I am so glad they hadn’t just been a figment of my imagination! Did you ever find out what they were being used for? Lots of love xxx
Hi Rachel! No we didn’t. I guess that it’s easier to transport huge things like that by sea than land. Very weird! xxx