12 June and the sun is shining, so we stop off at Small’s Cove for a swim. The temperature of the water is 14.6⁰C and ripples clearly above the beautifully clean golden sand.
There are two points to note here. First, that 14.6, although still fairly bracing for swimming, is nearly a full degree above Salcombe’s June average of 13.7 (it was 15.3 the following day at Ditch End). The sea is warming and rather more quickly than we thought it would a few years ago. Interestingly a surfing site on the internet gave Salcombe’s sea temperature on that day as 14.3. I don’t know how or where this is measured, but it was pretty accurate and saves all the fumbling to get a thermometer reading.
The second notable point was the beautiful golden sand in Small’s Cove. But, you may say, it’s always like that! Well, it is usually like that but the winter storms completely removed the sand from Small’s Cover and left it as a rocky creek. When I spoke at the Yacht Club in March there was no sand in Small’s and one of the first questions was whether it would come back.
Probably what had happened was that the sand had been carried by the storm to the Bar, stayed there for a couple of months and then gradually returned, washed, cleaned, with all the stones removed, pristine. This is the way the Harbour works. The Bar has a rôle in maintaining our beaches. But it follows that the Bar itself changes size and shape and there is a possibility that it has moved.
That, of course, is important for Harbour users. Salcombe’s Bar is undoubtedly one of the anxieties of visiting sailors, highlighted in Tennyson’s 1889 poem “Crossing the Bar” and, of course, the tragic loss of 13 of the 15 crew of Salcombe’s lifeboat “William and Emma” on the Bar when returning home on 27 October 1916. So the first priority is to make sure that the passage indicated by the leading lights is clear and secondly to survey the Bar to see whether changes to the charts are necessary.
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