ron-t kayaking blog
18 March 2016 ............ Ogmore to Nash Point - part 2
What a relief it was to turn and head back - the east wind was still there, but now it was behind me, and because it was an ebb tide, the wind was with the tide, so the sea had calmed down a lot.
So for the next few kilometres it was bliss - I just sort of sat there in my boat, making occasional light paddling strokes to keep on track - sometimes with the skeg up, sometimes with the skeg down.
I could even open up my deck bag and dig out my afternoon tea !
This is looking back down the coast towards Ogmore, which is somewhere down there in the distance.
Once past Dunraven Bay I could get in really close to the cliffs, and started to find numerous caves - a small one to start with - at least I could only see a small bit of it, I don`t know how big it is.
And then a bigger one - a very decent cave in fact -
Inside the cave, and it went much further in, but I couldn`t go any further because the water was too lumpy, the swell was coming in.
You will have to excuse the fuzzy picture, the low light level meant a long exposure time, so it has captured my movement.
Looking out - I really didn`t expect to get caves like this along this bit of coast.
Time for a bit of rock hopping - it was actually a bit harder than it looks at first sight - you can just see them if you look carefully, for quite a few metres on this side of the gap there were rocks that were just about level with surface of the water - because of the swell, sometimes they were dry, sometimes they were submerged.
So to get through the gap between the outcrop and the cliff meant also negotiating through these rocks, and the swell was causing quite a powerful surge through the gap.
Safely through !
Another couple of caves -
A rather intriguing looking hole in the cliffs, well above the high water line.
Here is a fascinating bit of the cliff that shows off the geology of the area - these huge sandstone cliffs sitting on a bed of limestone - at least I think it is limestone.
It is quite noticeable how the seam between the two rock types is getting eaten away.
A few more small caves before the cliffs run out, and we get the natural limestone sea wall.
A final picture looking back along the coast before heading round to the slipway and the end of the day.
Actually it turned out it wasn`t the end of the day or of the pictures - after I had packed up everything, I was sitting in another part of the car park looking out over the Bristol Channel to the sun that was slowly dropping, and watching as it dropped below a bank of cloud.
Then it appeared again - through the cloud. There was no hole in the cloud, the sun just appeared through it. Weird !
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