One of my favorite things to do is to take a walk to the beach at low tide, especially to a beach on Cape Cod Bay. It is always so gorgeous and you can walk out on the flats for miles.
It was low tide about 3:00 pm the other day and a perfect day for a walk. When I got to Boat Meadow Beach the clouds were just beautiful. And then I could see the huge rock by Rock Harbor with the sun shining through the clouds above it.
Pretty spectacular, don’t you think? I love how the sun and clouds are reflected in the tidal pool with the rippled sand from the flats in the foreground.
Rock Harbor in Orleans is always spectacular whether it is high tide or low tide. I loved this photograph of low tide where you can see the flats go out for miles and the beautiful clouds in the sky. You can see the channel and the channel markers that look like trees in the water.
I took the first photograph about 3-4 weeks ago. I took the second photograph just a few days ago. It was low tide and you can still walk way out. But you don’t see the channel markers. I wonder if they got destroyed with all of the ice that we had. It’s also hard to see where the channel is… I bet it will have to be dredged out again this spring and new channel markers put in.
We hiked out on the flats to the Rock Harbor Channel, where the boats go in and out, on the Eastham side the other day. It was so much fun. I had never walked out that far or been so close to the channel markers before. You can see why boats can only use the channel close to high tide.
We were driving back from town yesterday morning when we saw this fishing boat in the icy channel at Rock Harbor in Orleans. I took a few photos, thinking it was stuck in the ice.
We drove down to the pier and saw some of the crew working feverishly on board to get the outriggers down. We wondered how they would get off of the boat that was stuck in the ice.
Much to our surprise they started the engines up and took off through the ice, and very easily I might add, out to the rough seas. I realized that they couldn’t put the outriggers down going down the channel in the harbor as it is not wide enough so they had to stop at the mouth of the harbor to put them down. And then I researched what they are used for and learned that the outriggers widen the trolling area for fishing.
The moral of this story… don’t write the story before it plays out! I had it all written and then a nice surprise!
Cape Cod daily articles on the wonderful Cape Cod places to hike, experience and photograph. A Cape Cod Outdoor Adventure Series.
