On one day during our holiday in Essaouira in Morocco, the sea did something spectacular. It turned red. A thick band, which ran right along the beach, turned uniformly brown-red overnight. The colour stopped abruptly about a couple of hundred metres out to sea. The following day the effect had disappeared.
The locals told me this was a regular effect of sediment from the nearby river. I could not get enough height for a perfect photo, but hopefully you can make out the sudden change from brown-red to blue-green in this image.
Changing subjects as fast as the sea off Essaouira, there was a lovely review of my book by an American newspaper over the weekend.
I would like to pretend that an English professor compares my writing to Thoreau’s every weekend, but the fact that I am actively considering tracking down all those English teachers, who, over the…
This photo shows the colour difference as the water shallows over a sandbank of the beach at West Wittering. Colour has been used by nautical navigators since the first boats went to sea. In places where the water was too murky to use colour, like rivers, other techniques were developed. There are images dating back four thousand years that show ancient Egyptian boats plying the Nile with a man standing at the bow with a sounding pole. The pole gave an instant and very physical reading of depth.
In this photo that I took ten days ago of Totland Bay Pier on the Isle of Wight, there is a lot of blue. We become used to thinking of the sky and sea as blue, but in this picture it is easy to see how varied the colours can be. There is gradual shift from blue to off-white in the sky. In the sea there are three quite distinct bands, dark blue of deeper water, green-blue of shallow water and then light brown as the beach itself becomes visible through the water. There are also two other darker shades, where the groyne can be seen underwater and the thin shadow of the pier itself and finally the thin white strips where the tiny waves are breaking.