Quick Sand ...!!!

With the day promising to be sunny and warm, I was out early for a wander at Cherry Hill Beach, arriving at just after the 9.17am high tide. This beach is my favourite out of the many that are close by. Once again, like many times before, I had the whole 2Km stretch of bright white sand together with the rarely visited back ponds to myself.

The back ponds at this beach are always nice, quiet and peaceful, they can also occasionally offer a good backdrop for that elusive perfect photo I have been in search of for many years.

The ponds may be nice, but extreme caution is required due to pockets of random soft wet sand. A few times that I have been there, I have walked into such conditions, but this morning was a little different ~ I actually walked into quicksand …

The dark grey water-saturated mixture of sand, slit and possibly some clay took me by surprise at how deep it appeared to be, and how fast I was sinking into it. I felt that if I stood around too long, I would soon be knee-deep in the stuff. But with a firm grip on the camera (always priority #1), followed by a quick scramble, I found the safety of some firmer sand close by.

I was enormously relieved that I did not have my brand new runners with me. I am currently breaking them in, but did not take them today due a blister they gave me yesterday ~ I guess that was kind of fortunate, blisters can perhaps be a blessing ..!!

This mornings pics, some taken before, and others after the incident ...

A perfect design or perfect accident …?

Another outing and another session of deep thought ~ this time it was about our planet’s position in the universe. Unlike all other planet’s that we currently know about, Earth seems to be the one that is perfectly located ~ why ...?

This pale blue dot of ours occupies a location that is just the perfect distance from the sun, known as the habitual zone, where water does not boil away or freeze solid. If we were just a little closer to the sun, we could have ended up like Venus, a burning hostile world. A little further away we would be like Mars, cold, dry and lifeless.

But it is not all about distance, Earth’s perfect rotation is equally important, it creates day and night, if it was too slow, days would scorch, and nights would freeze, weather systems and winds would be completely chaotic. Then there is the Moon which plays the perfect role by stabilizing the Earth’s tilt, helping to keep our seasons relatively stable. Even within the solar system, we have a giant perfect protector in the form of Jupiter, which deflects many dangerous asteroids that could otherwise head our way.

So, is all of this a perfect design, or just a perfect accident where everything happened to align perfectly...?

Maybe the universe is not perfect, but for us on Earth it could feel like it is, but only we humans on the surface, stopped our wars, unrest and poisoning, of what I believe is a perfect accident.

Today’s pics from the LaHave Islands and Rissers Beach ...