Sunday 19 October 2014

Thunderstorms

Yesterday we ate lunch on a sunny terrace in temperatures of 19C, with a balmy southeasterly blowing into our faces.  By five, the wind had swung into the SSW, bringing heavy showers, fierce, swirling gusts of wind, and heavy clouds carrying thunder and lightning.  It's one of the oddities of this place that our thunderstorms come in winter, usually on a westerly, perhaps generated when cooler air blows in across a warmer ocean.

By this morning the wind had settled in the west, the sky had turned uniform grey, and Sanna had its winter look.  The previous night's winds, which had gusted to near gale force....

....had created a heavy swell which was pounding the more open, westerly-facing of Sanna's beaches, shifting the sand around so....

....in places masses of flat periwinkles, Littorina obtusata, and other seashells were exposed along the shoreline.

The Sanna burn was in spate, bringing down water the colour of whisky....

....to stain the waters of the bay which, only a day ago, would have been Caribbean blue in the sunshine.

As we returned to the car a skein of geese came over, fighting to maintain their V-shaped formation but constantly knocked out of it by the gusting wind.  We couldn't see which sort of geese they were until...

....the wonders of modern photo editing revealed the black necks of barnacle geese.

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