Over the restless sea

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/20/over-restless-sea

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Cresting the rise at the end of the machair track I catch my breath at the first sight of the scene before me. Where usually there are miles of beach there is almost nothing but sea.

As far as the eye can see there is line after broken line of wild, tumbling rollers, the wind streaming a fine mist of spray from their foam topped crests … and at the top of this highest of tides the wind driven waves are surging onwards almost to the foot of the low dunes.

In the already fading light of the late afternoon it’s a seascape painted in muted silver-greys and slate greens, its distant reaches further softened by the haze of airborne spray.

I set out along the dune-top path walking until eventually it seems that perhaps the tide, if not on the turn, is at least reaching no higher and that, wellie clad, it will be possible to walk back safely along the narrow strip of sand.

Related: Elegant whoopers come to Swan Loch

Down at beach level there is an even greater sense of the power of the waves as each builds and then crashes, every one adding to the volume of the constant background roar. Well out beyond the breaking waters, almost on the horizon, a line of white birds is flying low above the constantly shifting turbulence of the restless sea.

I lift my binoculars expecting to find a troop of hardy gannets on a fishing expedition but am awed to see instead a small flock of whooper swans heading directly for landfall. Again and again I lose sight of them behind a curtain of spray, but each time they reappear closer than before as beat after beat of their powerful elegant wings drives them onward towards the end of their journey from Iceland.

Only as they near the chaos of salt-laden air above the unceasing rollers do they seek to gain height, their perfect V-shaped line becoming a scattered group as the smoothness of their flight suddenly becomes ragged and effortful in the buffeting wind. And then, above the land at last, they come together once more, flying purposefully in the direction of the loch now just a field or two away.