A "Different" Trip to the Beach!

I spent a happy 4 hours this morning on a trip with 4 pals from the camera club. We went (fully socially distanced!) to Seaham, situated on the northeast coast between Sunderland and Middlesbrough. We started off on "Blast Beach" - so called because there used to be a blast furnace there, and the beach is still clearly heavily polluted by iron salts and coal. There are some amazing coloured pools at the base of the cliffs, especially seen in the 2nd extra. In the 4th extra you can see that some flies and a spider didn't survive on the polluted water and mud. There is, however, a colony of fulmars nesting on the cliffs (see the 3rd extra of one just taking off from its nest). The 1st extra gives a general view of the beach.

By the time we'd finished there we were able to climb through the arch on the headland to "Chemical Beach", named after a local chemical works. In spite of its name it seems less polluted than Blast Beach but it still has lots of photo ops, especially of a rusting old railway bogey as seen in the main, long-exposure, blip.

I've put some more shots in a Google Album at this link. In one of them you'll see that one of my pals had a little accident with his foot in the mud!!

(Note: We do, of course, have some fabulous, unspoilt beaches on the northeast coast - see here - but the ones we visited today were fascinating and great for less usual photos!)