Beach Bonkers

from Coastal Guide 2020

Coastal shopper

Suffolk’s shingle beaches are home to many treasures and provide a rare habitat for a variety of vegetation. Expert beachcomber Kate Osborne explains what to look out for next time you’re at the water’s edge…

We’ve a lot of shingle beaches in Suffolk – so many in fact that we might take them for granted, or complain that they hurt our feet or are rubbish for sandcastles at high tide.

But did you know that beaches like ours are only found in three places in the world? They are known as Vegetated Shingle Habitat and the plants that live here are specially adapted to the desert-like conditions. The stones hide many treasures and some are even treasures in their own right!

Some beachcombing finds are common to every beach and some finds are more common than others. What is surprising is that beaches a short distance apart can be good for beachcombing very different things.

Seaweed often marks the high tide line on the beach and is often the best place to look for treasures.

There are over 650 species of seaweed in the UK. Seaweed, along with driftwood, is critically important to the food chain of the beach, providing shelter and food for tiny little bugs on the beach, that bring in the beetles and spiders we may see, which in turn provide food for birds and mammals. Explore the seaweed – but please always leave it on the beach.

43 Coastal Guide 2020 Felixstowe Felixstowe beach is brilliant for beachcombing. It’s great if you have limited mobility or very young children, as there are lots of old concrete groynes and the promenade to sit on. There are tons of treasures here – you should be able to find at least 15 different species of shells including: • Limpets, which have their teeth on their tongue, will grind their shell for a perfect fit to make a home ‘scar’. They return to this every time the tide goes out and await its return when they will graze on algae on the rocks. • Slipper limpets which are born as males but then become females. • Fossil sharks’ teeth As sharks can have up to 3,000 teeth at any one time and up to 30,000 in their lifetime there are plenty to be found and a huge variety to look for, from long and thin to squat and triangular.

Other natural treasures include square, black mermaids’ purses which are the egg cases of skates and rays, and sea wash balls, which look like clumps of Rice Krispies and are the egg cases laid by Common Whelks. The first few whelks »

» that hatch out will cannibalise their siblings as they are the first available food source.

Bawdsey Bawdsey beach is stunning and wild, full of shingle plants with white lines of common whelk shells marking the tide line. There’s a great mix of beachcombing treasures to be found, especially: • Top shells, which were used by the Victorians for buttons. • Mud with holes in. The holes are made by a rock-boring piddock which spends its entire life in the mud, sticking up a feeding tube when it gets peckish.

Few top shells or examples of mud with holes in make it further down the coast to Felixstowe beach. • Sea glass is essentially pretty litter. Once the glass has passed the point of being lethally sharp, it is smoothed by the stones and the waves and becomes frosted sea gems, much loved by collectors and crafters. You will always find sea glass where you find people. • Bawdsey Quay beach is another good spot for fossil sharks’ teeth too!

Sizewell Sizewell beach is superb for shingle plants and, further along it, there’s a chance of finding chunks of coralline crag - a reddish-brown local shelly sand. This is 2-3million years old and full of fossils, including shells and small organisms. Sizewell is great for: • Hag stones (or stones with holes all the way through them). Historically thought to protect you from the ‘hag of the night’ giving you nightmares, hag stones are generally perceived as lucky and so are hung in long strings on boats, in homes and beach huts. • Driftwood is another beautiful find but should

Photos courtesy of Beach Bonkers, Cerys Parker and Rachel Sloane

always be left on the beach unless it’s full of nails or heavily painted, in which case it needs to go into the bin. Wood found on the beach is often full of holes, the small ones caused by something similar to a wood louse, called a gribble. The large tunnels, often lined with a white chalky substance, are caused by shipworm; not a worm at all, but a pair of shells with a body too long to be contained within them. • Crab and lobster claws, and shells, are often found in pieces. Both shed their hard outer bodies as they grow. Lobsters eat theirs to reclaim the calcium, so lobster claws you find on the beach may well be the remains of someone’s picnic!

• Beach Bonkers was founded by Kate Osborne in July 2016 and is run as a not-for-profit. You can join Kate on a beachcomb throughout the year and she also organises a quarterly beach clean survey that you can take part in. Kate also brings beachcombing to schools, libraries, festivals and fetes with a portable shingle mini beach, a tableful of beachcombed treasures and a giant beachcombing board game. She is much in demand, giving talks to WIs and other clubs. See www.beachbonkers.org.uk for Kate’s events page, or call her on 07512 557200.

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Ship to shore A new East Coast initiative is helping women navigate life by teaching them how to sail

We all like a boat that’s on ‘an even keel’ and in everyday life, too, those words suggest that all is well. In both cases, it’s a state achieved by learning to work with what we have, meeting the challenges of those things we can’t change and staying focused only on what really matters – and an analogy that resonates powerfully with professional life-coach, NLP practitioner and mum-of-three Miriam Burrell and qualified RYA instructor Bev Lloyd-Roffe.

The two have been friends for many years, but it was a discussion about the common themes in their work with women that led, in 2019, to the launch of BeMighty (www. bemighty.coach), an initiative that combines one-to-one life-coaching with learning how to sail a yacht.

Mentor, trainer and trouble-shooter Miriam had identified that many of her female clients were fighting a losing battle against negative internal narratives: mistrusting their instincts and grappling with imposter syndrome. Bev, meanwhile, had noticed that the energy »

and atmosphere within the women-only groups she taught was radically different to others: there was more support, encouragement and shared counsel, her students instinctively granting one another ‘space’ to work stuff out and applauding everyone’s success.

”Our intention is to create an experience that enables, empowers and inspires women to be an even better version of themselves, and to deliver it in a fun, different and challenging way,” says Miriam.

“When clients first sit down with me, they have lost sight of the real world, or at least the present moment. They’re so busy listening to the chatter in their heads that they’ve become disconnected with what is actually going on right in front of them.” “Yachting is a perfect metaphor for life,” says Bev. “If you stop focusing on the wind and the tide – the only things that truly matter – you end up in trouble very quickly. But if you remain focused and notice the subtle changes going on around you, you’ll alter your tack accordingly. The trick to sailing – and life – is being truly ‘present’. Do that and you’ll stay on course.” »

“It’s only by stepping out of our comfort zone that we can really discover what we’re capable of”

With places limited to just four participants at a time, BeMighty passages begin in Ipswich and after initial introductions and a safety briefing, crews are quickly out on the water.

“Over two days we’ll sail the River Orwell, navigate our way through the shipping channels of the ports of Felixstowe and Harwich and into the Stour,” says Bev. “There’ll be container vessels, an occasional cruise ship and all sorts of other sailing and motorboats plus locks, fast-flowing tides and unexpected shallows to deal with… the combination of intense activity and calm creates ideal conditions for reflection both as a group and individually.”

With one successful sailing season under her BeMighty belt, Miriam says: “It’s only by stepping out of our comfort zone that we can really discover what we’re capable of. We give women a space to reflect on what they are good at, and a variety of tasks that challenge them mentally and physically. We allow them to get in their own way in order to learn how to get out of their own way. “Bev gives instructions and all around the wind is blowing, the sail is swinging from one side of the boat to the other, it’s chaotic and it’s overwhelming! And then, suddenly, it’s not… it’s calm, quiet, the boat is moving under the power of the wind alone, the sunlight is reflecting off the water, everyone pauses and there is a moment of recognition that you are doing this thing… you are sailing! We’ve witnessed a physical transformation of the women in front of us. The smiles come and their confidence grows until you can almost feel it vibrating around the boat. The crew finish the course with countless new skills, friends, laughter lines and, most importantly, a strategy for coaching themselves through whatever choppy waters lie ahead.”

• BeMighty offers a range of individual and corporate options for participants to choose from, each including life-coaching alongside the two-day sailing experience. Prices include meals on board the yacht, plus all the essential safety and wet-weather gear. For more information, see www.bemighty.coach