Rockpooling is a pursuit of exquisite discovery. Our eyes and hands reach through windows into another world. The sea is populated by a greater variety of animal types than the land – most of life’s evolutionary routes have never, or not yet, made the transition – but these pools are our interface.
Newgale has a broad, gently sloping, sandy beach, backed with cliffs of roughly convoluted purple and grey sandstone. The sky is blue and the sun warm, so much so that the beach is busy with walkers, and some folk are braving the spring sea, mostly clothed in black neoprene. Generally the seafarers are bobbing in the shallows on surfboards, although the surf isn’t “up”.
A rock platform is exposed at the southern end of the beach during low tide; an expanse of flat boulders and interconnected channels. Turning over the slabs reveals droopy red blobs – beadlet anemones; young pinkish-orange starfish; small, greenish and spiny sea urchins; many shore crabs, but also angry and animated, red-eyed velvet swimming crabs, robust pie-shaped edible crabs, which, despite their substantial armoury of claws, simply contort and freeze when picked up.
Little thumbnail-sized crabs with disproportionately large claws and only three pairs of walking legs, scuttle over the underside of the rocks: these are broad-clawed and long-clawed porcelain crabs. A single Risso’s crab turns up, sturdy, flattened, with blackish claw tips and hairy legs.
The most exciting discovery is a sea lemon, a sea-slug shaped like half a plum with a soft warty skin. Often they are bright yellow, but this one is purplish, mottled with cream and black, blending into the rocks. Nearby are thick encrustations of the orange bread sponge on which the sea lemon feeds, and also its gelatinous eggs – like coiled sheets of buttercup-yellow blancmange.
The tide rises quickly on the flat beach and water swirls up through the rocks; there is an adrenalin moment in which becoming marooned against the cliffs seems possible, but retreat is easily achieved, and an ice-cream is the reward.
