Today I did an absolutely beautiful hike at the Gaff Point Trail. This was the fifth time I have done this trail since moving to the South Shore in 2016, all previous adventures were during 2017.
The trail
is a 7km loop which begins with a 1.5km walk to the southwest end of Hirtles
Beach. The beach is 3km of spectacular crescent-shaped sand and cobble
stone shoreline. As for the actual trail itself, it offers some great scenery with a mixture of
beach, estuary, forest, rugged coastline and huge waves.
Like my
past visits to Gaff Point, I took a slight detour and went to Sandy Cove (the
Secret Beach). The cove with its neat little beach is tucked away between some
very steep cliffs and is accessible by way of scaling down a bank with the aid
of some frayed rope tied to some trees above, unlike my last visit I decided not
do the rope scaling today.
When I
arrived at Hirtles Beach the tide was just about to hit its peak. I spent my
first few minutes watching a couple of Harbour Porpoises not too far off in the calm waters providing some morning entertainment, unfortunately I did not get any pictures of
this I wanted instead to fully enjoy the show.
Around all
sides of the trail, the waves did not disappoint they were spectacular to look
out, big and crashing over the rocks, which provided me with lots of photo ops.
By the time I completed the hike with some additional off the trail rock climbing, the tide on the beach was almost hitting its low exposing more sand than cobble stone.
It was a
very good and thoroughly enjoyable day out, perhaps the best one this summer ….
