Another Trip to Fortescue and then the Beach at Avalon!

Ken was up at 5 and I was up by 6:15, did some reading, ate a light breakfast and then the 4 of us were on our way to Fortescue by 7:15.  We thought we would go out for a late breakfast after spending about an hour or so looking for sea glass - NOT! We are all too "addicted" to sea glass hunting and we spent 4 hours searching! By then it was almost lunch time!

This is the "large" beach at Fortescue where we find all
the sea glass.  This is the tide when we first arrived.  4 hours
later the water was almost up to the seawall!

It was another amazing day of finding 100's of pieces.  They pieces are all over the small beach, but you have to walk around all the horseshoe crabs when you are looking. I thought they were dead, but boy did I jump when I went to get a piece of sea glass and the crab moved!

Fortescue Beach has been designated as a Horseshoe Crab Habitat.  So here is a brief lesson on horseshoe crabs in this area.  They arrive on the beach in May to mate and lay their eggs - 1000's of eggs.  During spawning, they form "clusters" along the water with as many as 12 satellite males grouped around 1 female.  We saw that today and the poor females looked like they didn't have much choice in the "affair"! 

Just a nice sized group!

Hey, enough already!!!

Hey, take it easy!  There is only 1 female here!

Females burrow into the sand, lay masses of green eggs, which are then fertilized by the males around her.  Each female will return to the beach on successive tides laying as many as 4 to 7 egg clusters with each tide.  Each cluster, which incubates 5 to 8" below the surface, contains about 4000 eggs. Red Knots, a threatened bird species, stop and feed on the eggs of the horseshoe crab on their epic journey from South American to the Arctic.  We only left Fortescue around 12:30, so a late breakfast stop was not necessary.  We missed breakfast!!

We were back to the CG by 1:30, ate lunch, changed, and were on Avalon Beach by 2:30.  It was a gorgeous day with lots of sunshine, temperatures in the 70's, and very windy!  Ken and I took a walk, did some reading, and then the 4 of us played 2 games of Bocce - the men won the 1st one handily, but the second game was 21 to 19 with them being victorious again!

The beach was rather full today!

I am being a good girl and wearing my sun protective
shirt even when it is warm on the beach!

By the time we played Bocce most of the sunbathers had left!

Back to Waldo around 6:30 and boy, the showers felt great!  We grilled for dinner and spent time washing and laying out all the sea glass we found today. It was a very successful hunt!

The 4 of us decided not to get together this evening because at 8:30 the Martins still hadn't had dinner.  Ken sorted through the photos he took today, I downloaded them, and then did this post.

It was a great day and we feel very fortunate that we escaped all the bad weather last evening.  We saw pictures of how a tornado (they think) did touch down only about 10 miles from here and there were lots of downed trees and power lines.  They had wind gusts up to 80 mph.  We are thankful we did not experience any of that!

They are predicting some more thunderstorms for tomorrow so we may be spending the majority of the day here at the CG.  We shall see!  Hard to imagine that we have been here for 7 nights.  The time is just flying!!!!!