A fresh and brief lunchtime blog. Knowing that I was delivering the dogs for a lunchtime pampering session at Wembury I planned for their second walk of the day to be at low tide on the beach.

So much messy fun to be had with a huge area of beach to scamper on and hunt for seaweed.

But even better fun to be had when an impressionable young pup could be chased at high speed.

Nobody needs to see the inside of my car once I could persuade them to leave the beach. I will have to clean it before I pick them up as pristine pooches in a few hours time.

This weeks, unintentional, low tide theme is proving to be fun.

My Dad was an eternal optomist. I neve knew his glass to be anything less than half full. Not that his life was always easy, but he could always find a way around difficulties or find something to be grateful for. One of his favourite moments in life was when he could declare something positive out of mediocrity or worse. Yesterday he would have declared that we had all got the best out of the day.

We took a late trip out to the beach when the tide was out. For the most part it had been a grey day but as we started the descent to the coast the sun appeared from a crack over the horizon. Giving us our first ever sighting of the Eddystone Lighthouse.

Set on a perilous outcrop 12 miles offshore it protects seafarers from harm on a notorious spot for shipwrecks. The weather conditions have never been right for us to see it on our regular visits to this beach. So without anything else we had added value to our day. But the sun prevailed.

When the cafe had an Internet fail there could have been grumpy faces but some hidden cash bought everyone a late afternoon snack, to fuel our afternoon wanderings in the unexpected sunshine.

My Dad would have said ” I think we have had the best of the day” It was his great grand daughters first time on a beach. She was a lucky girl to have such a perfect moment.

November surprised us yesterday. Our plans involved fairly heavy rain, a constant state of being damp and a mug of soup as a reward for battling inclement weather.

There was no battle.

For more than two hours blue skies chased away the greige of the previous week. The tide at Wembury was low enough to fill those hours with rock-pooling adventures.

But first a little bit of serendipity, the foreground in the top picture of the blog shows seaweed copying a geographical feature.

We had taken wellies to walk the muddy coastal path but they got use taking us into the deeper rock pools.

Unfortunately, we both suffer from very muscular calf syndrome. ( some might call them plump) So we only wear short wellies, short wellies are no match for a rapidly incoming tide so we needed to be quite nimble to avoid wet feet. Hugo and Lola had no such problems and bravely waded into rock pools up to their chests in water. Lola was rewarded for enthusiasm, on her return to dry land, by a swift right hook from Hugo.

Balance prevented any watery rock pool pictures but the dry bits had captured some wonderful sea detritus from the previous weeks stormy weather.

Then the tide came in and with it the weather.

Turning our rock pool world into a playground for much braver souls.