This was to be my third and last of the day and what a good cache to end with. I'd been to the Church in the Sea before in my pre-geocaching days and so knew where it was. I'd not calculated the tides today but I knew that when I started caching earlier this afternoon it was right in on the Menai Straits and so could only be going out by now. When I got to the end of the lane for parking I could see that the church was fully exposed and that the sea was a fairly long way out.
When I got out of the car there were two birds of prey circling over the fields and so I quickly put my telphoto lens on my camera and went to take some pictures. Unfortunately, by the time I had got out of the car, the two birds had almost disappeared from sight. After cursing my luck (I've been trying to get a decent picture of a bird of prey for a while now) I set off foe the church taking only my camera and GPSr with me.
Once down on the beach I was amazed to see the wide variety of geological and biological things to look at and take pictures: there were green and grey highly metamorphosed and folded rocks with quartz veins, red boulder clay dropped by a retreating glacier overlying the eroded rocks, many wild flowers and seaweeds and at least five types of birds. I spotted curlew, oystercatchers, an egret, gulls and ringed plovers. The last were amazing as I'd walk up to what I thought was a pile of rocks which would then scurry or fly away!
I wasn't sure which was the best way to approach the church and after one wrong attempt where I ended up walking on nothing but slippy seaweed, I realised that there was a sort of raised causeway with larger rocks forming a path to island. So I backtracked a hundred metres and then resumed my approach to the cache. The clue suggested that the cache was in a wall and so I first thought it meant the wall around the island - I didn't think it would be the church wall. Anyway I looked round the whole of the island because there were lots of gaps in the wall where things could be hidden. All the time I was thinking, it can't be in here, the sea would eventually get at it and wash it away.
Needless to say I didn't find it in the island wall and so I went up the steps to the church and found in it the first place I looked. Then I wished I'd read the description properly and brought a pencil with me - I had nothing to write with and so couldn't sign the log. Instead I took a picture of my GPSr and the cache at GZ to prove that I had been there and I may return to sign it on another day when I do the nearby Peninsular Views.
After taking lots of pictures of the coastline, birds and mountain views I made my way back to the car. Just as I was coming up off the beach I heard a voice say "Did you get some good shots then?" It was a local farmer who was out walking his dog and feeding some of his horses in a nearby field. We had a nice chat about the bird life in the area and he pointed out an egret to me that I'd missed on my trip to the church. He also mentioned that there was a rare barn owl in a nearby farm building but I wasn't lucky enough to see it.
A great place and one I'm sure I'll be returning to take some more pictures in the future.
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