Atlantic Tides

I remember that in my 5th grade English student book there was a topic about tides - a long and boring story, mostly because of all the difficult expressions we had to underline and learn by heart. Just to refresh my memory I took down my old student book from the shelf (yes, I still have it) and looked up what it was about.

"Long ago people living near the coast of the Atlantic Ocean noticed that the level of the sea rose and fell twice every day. They noticed that this didn't always happen at the same time, at the same hour, but that it took place regularly. People did not understand the cause of this rising and falling. But they noticed that there was some connection between the moon and the waters of the ocean. Today we know that the water of the sea is always moving in or out along the shores."

When learning it, I was probably like the ones who had lived long ago and didn't quite understand how it all worked. Especially because we, living here at the Baltic sea, never had any tides and the water of the sea stood quite at the same place almost all year round, without very little exceptions and so it was quite hard to picture the tides. Later of course, when reading more literature, I got to know about it some more and in 2010, when visiting England and Wales, I was happy to recognize it, when seeing  the boats and yachts standing on the plain sand and I really thought about my old school book again.

But this time we spent three marvellous days in Duncannon, just at the sea side, in a nice summer house and I was able to see all that with my own eyes. We arrived in the afternoon, which was probably one of the three lovely days during the summer, and the beach was full of people enjoying the nice weather. Just to mention - the sea was exactly where it had to be - a nice sandy beach, not very wide, but quite enough and the sea, standing still, not moving anywhere. What was totally different from any other beach I have ever seen, were the cars, parked everywhere on the sand, some of them almost in the water.

It seemed that only I was surprised about that, because all the others were spending their time besides their cars, using them as lunch tables and playing ball over them. The ice-cream car was parked with its engine roaring over the beach, but probably it was just because of keeping the fridge working and the ice cream cold. We spent some time walking around and ended our day in the local pub, had some ciders and dinner and arrived at our nice summer house.

Our house had a small garden just looking at the sea and in the morning when I went out, the sea was gone, and it means it was totally gone, no water, just kilometers of wet sand.

We spent a nice day on the beach, found a really nice corner, where the cars were not allowed to park and enjoyed the warm day. Somewhere near 2 o'clock the water started to come back little by little. The life guards were busy to get the people back to the sea shore, because a lot of them, included myself, were walking on the wet sand that had been the bottom of the sea just a day before. And then the sea came back, just during about two hours. That was really amazing and unbelievable. So now I have seen how it really works, not just from the books :)

In the evening the local musicians were performing at the pub and everybody was singing. It's not possible to describe how much I liked it. For the first time in my life I saw people play Spoons, actually I didn't even know about that kind of instrument before. So besides being just great and fantastic and really full of enjoyment, it was also an educative weekend and I love Duncannon and want to come back the next year. And I am quite sure that I will. The next time it would be interesting to wonder around a bit more and discover maybe some neighbourhood as well.