Stranded
While watching the steady advance of the spectral gulls, white underwings glinting in the morning sun, I spotted them. Two tourists, un-locals, tide fodder.
Ten minutes out on muddying sand, oblivious to the incessant creep that began to fill the channel, their only path back to terra-firma. I called out, they waved a happy smile back. I saw a future of wet feet, cold thighs. I beckoned them back, they shrugged a ‘we know what we’re doing’ kind of reposte.
The flurry of gulls chittered ahead, a white gloss on a blue sky, seeking the edge that mobilised a bevvy of waders. The walkers rambled oh so slowly, stopping to point at the wheeling flock of escapees. Laughing at their dumb labrador who was staring at the channel ahead. He knew things!
The Irish Sea exhaled a breath and birthed a bore that rippled a shock wave. I shouted a warning over the hiss of the incoming and finally they took heed of the Bay and ran the final minutes, marooned now. Encircled by the serpentine inevitability of a Canute defying wash, the realisation struck them.
Stuttering with indecision they stood still, seeking a dry path, the one that was but now wasn’t. I urged them to hurry as the Bay brimmed high, called by a moon, super, blue. ‘Strike out now, stride in!’ The channel got deeper by the second, the once firm bottom now softened and quickened.
Twenty feet of flood ahead of them they finally waded onwards. By the time they had crossed it was thirty feet wide, the acres of sand on which they had stood now a mere disappearing spit. Their dog swam through the strip of widening water, pushed by the tide, parried to the right, pulled under, a canine cough chilling the bay. Circled by crows he touched base and struggled through the bogging marsh, reaching safety seconds before he could not.
