Storms stir up seawater temperatures

6th November 2023

The road is slimy with shadows of flood. Damp reminders of scary turn-arounds with silt edgings and towed-aways now happily gone.

In absurd contrast, this morning’s sun is so bright it makes me squint and turns the fields with new tufts of winter wheat iridescent green, patterned with clear, pretty puddles, like mini country ponds. Now the sun has at last come out to suck the water up and the invisible water-table drowns the residue from the ever-damp fields, we are another country.

If it weren’t for the dark blue of the water and the noticeably low hanging sun, this morning’s beach would have been a plausible summer scene. The sea was mainly ripples with the occasional benign rounded waves, dotted with happy bobbing heads, moving between each other, back and forth, like balls on a pool table in super slow motion.

The shoreline had a wide blond sand border, speckled with pebbles but not worn by feet, like in the summer months when it can seem that there are more dogs than people.

At eight, we are an hour before low tide. The water is high enough for a proper swim, and for the fishing boat to get out. We can touch the bottom en point with some effort, but touch the bottom we can. It’s really the shallow end.

The water was tempered by a light south westerly breeze, it is gentle and kind and the sun shines through it and hopefully, we’ll get breathing space before the next weather event turns it upside down again.

The storms leave their mark, not only in a thorough rearrangement of the sand and shingle of the beach, but in the temperature of the sea water. Properly mixed now in the washing machine of the weather systems and it feels like November, some rashly call it, ‘winter’.

Today’s water temperature is thirteen point seven degrees or eleven and a half degrees, depending on who you believe. The higher temperature is published online by seatemperature.net, who condition their stats with notice that onshore temperatures can be colder after prolonged rain or strong winds. The lower temperature was recorded live by the electrician who had bought an electronic thermometer .

Whichever is true (personally, I believe the lower), the water is cold. It feels very cold to get into, nothing strange about that, it feels cold to get into much of the year, but it keeps feeling cold. There is not yet a noticeable hug when the sea tries to squeeze the air from your chest, but it’s tricky, I make noise to distract me, and when I am in, even with the fresh sun on my face, chatting to my friends, I think about little other than getting out again.

In a moment, we’re back on the beach, testing body temperature with the little red dot of the thermometer. I’m seventeen point five degrees, higher than some, lower than others. I have no idea whether the number is significant, only that I want to get dry and dressed and somewhere warm as soon as I can. So I rush and in so doing slip into the largest puddle on the road from the car park, a proper ‘Carry On’ fall, pain-free, but coating every dry thing I am wearing in filthy sandy mud. A lesson.

More importantly, it is Rupert’s Mum’s birthday. Rupert waited patiently throughout her quick dip then joined us on the beach in a natty, knitted winter coat. It’s November after all.

The fishing boat is about to go out and is already circled by gulls waiting for their breakfast.