When visiting the Cape next time, take a detour to Long Beach (between Centreville and Osterville).

The day we visited was a rather windy day, and the surf was up. Walking on the sand, it was very hard to keep one’s hat on, and in fact mine decided to go for a short flight (luckily rescued before getting taken by one of the many seagulls). The gulls would just hang in the wind, not moving about ten feet off the ground. Amazing how they can do that without flapping their wings! These were the guys who went after my hat

The beach is really on a very narrow but long island. On one side is the ocean and on the other is the outlet from the river to the sea.

Along the top of the sand dunes, were strands of dune grass. When the wind would hit them, they appeared to be dancing or be like waves in the ocean but on the sand.

Another interesting feature of the beach is that parts of it are private. Every so often, walking on the sand between the grass and the ocean, there are these signs stating that that portion of the beach is private.  Then 30 yards later, the beach is public again – a bit confusing. But upon reading the fine print on the signs, one can detect that it is OK to cross the private stretch as you proceed to the public stretch and don’t linger. Since we didn’t have a timer, and no specific time was specified, it was somewhat difficult to determine what constituted linger versus, say, walking slowly.

However, it is at the far end or tip of the beach that the most unusual sight was spotted. At first I thought that they were coconuts floating on top of the waves. Then realizing that there are no palm trees on the Cape (that I’m aware of), it was necessary to investigate. The phenomenon was explained when walking a little further down the beach; we saw on the sand that there were dozens of Horseshoe crabs of all sizes (and all sexes, I guess – hard to distinguish).

The high tide must have pushed them on the sand and then left them high and dry! Some had been pulled back into the ocean and that was what was floating on top of the waves. But I’ll leave you with this fact: the waves were pushing them in a direction parallel to the shore not up on the shore. We followed them along the shore back the way we had come, and they never came ashore – stayed out there riding the crests of the waves.

Could this have been a horseshoe crab convention, which did not end well? It’s a puzzle to me.