Les galets and the impact of the sea tides.

"Les galets blues"
"Les galets de la Molière"
"Camping les galets"

The word "galets" was everywhere near our stay in France and when I looked it up, I understood it are the pebbles that make up the beach front (only south?) of the Somme Bay.  This was the one disadvantage that I discovered quickly when checking out Jan's booking for our vacation: it's a pebble beach, not a sand beach as we are used to in Belgium.   The sand beaches are wildly advertised for their vast surface at low tide. 

The difference between low tide and high tide at the Somme Bay makes up to 11 meters.  That's not a typo: 11 meters.  So it's quite understandable that our little house was equipped with some tide barometer in which we could check in how many hours it would be high tide or low tide.  The entire region lives at the rhythm of the tides:  

- Walks in the Bay? at low tide

- Spotting sleeping seals?  at low tide up to 2-3 hours before high tide

- Boat and kayak trips? at high tide

- Kite lessons? at low tide

- Going to the beach:  at low tide up to 2,5 hours before and after high tide.  This means that for a full 5 hours the beach is taken over by the vast water mass.   
If high tide falls around noon or shortly after, it only gives you a few hours early in the morning or early in the evening to dig for sand castles.   Lessons learned if we ever return and if we have the luxury of choice: try to book a week when low tide falls in the afternoon. 

It is the mountains of "galets" (and dunes) that protect the polder fields of the Bay.   The galets itself are layered in the lime rocks that border the Côte Opâle up to Normandie and the English coast.  We went to see some of these rocks and you can see the horizontal layers of stones stuck in the lime quite well. Erosion liberates the rocks and the water rounds them into a billion blue pebbles.  They are now harvested industrially at multiple spots but the natural coast line is also protected and boosted with extra pebbles industrially. 

One - Two - Three of Four steep hills of pebbles, each multiple meters high, line the coast.   A lower high tide just touches the feet of these hills but on other days the water rises another few hours and reaches the top or flows beyond the first hills.  They are quite a challenge to conquer on slippers while carrying beach material.  Behind them are the "schorre" or salt marches that get under water a couple of times a year with its own salty vegetation and animals that feed here and then there's sand dunes.  

Quite different from our fully urbanised crowded Belgian coast line! 

Spotting seals swimming by at high tide with success

approx 2 hours before high tide

Spotting some "sea dogs" ;)

Les galets bleus

Steep hills!

Our daily journey to the beach: 

• Walk to the end of our dead-end little street
  
  
• Cross the Bois-les-pins behind our door and choose one of the many trails across for 10 minutes to arrive at the beach road on the other side
  
  
• Cross the beach road and enter one of the access trails into the dunes.  
  
  If high tide, the sandy area in the dunes there was an alternative to play from the beach itself. Most of the dune area however was covered with a dense vegetation of grasses, thorny blackberries (yumm!) etc.
  
  
• Conquer the hills of pebbles and descend if low tide to install ourselves on the immense or tiny peace of sand beach.  This usually took another 10 minutes. 
  
  We learned quickly to choose a big trail which had a prepared wide pebble road crossing the salt marches and bridged the different pebble hills in one more gentle slope, which was the only road to be able to pull our cart up to its destination.

Sand castles got reinforcement with hundreds of "galets".  Nevertheless the next high tide killed our impressive fort.

Happy at the beach (while hoarding binoculars)

Sunset