Say hello, wave goodbye

Whether constructive or destructive, waves–even as high as four double-decker buses–claw at our shores in a frenzy of energy, observes Annemarie Munro

- Annemarie Munro

AS you look out to sea, the breath of a Puerto Rican blowing on his hot morning coffee travels without interruption to the shores of the British Isles to ruffle your hair. The breezes that blow through the fronds of the palm trees lining the sandy beaches of Martinique in the West Indies transfer energy into the water to create waves of power that surge unimpeded to our western shores.

Waves shape our island. They eat into the land on our eastern coast and shift the chewed-up land around to the western coastlines, spitting it out at the wide sandy beaches of Devon and Cornwall. There is no better way to understand how we are all connected globally to the interaction between wind, energy and topography than to watch the waves.

How many of you have visited the shores, walking briskly as you listen to music through headphones, exercising the dogs as you plan the week’s menu or marching beside a friend to catch up on news and gossip? We feel better for it, even if, once home, we have no clear memory of the beach itself. We are often too busy and distracted to notice the tide or the signature chatter of each wave, but what should we be noticing about the waves?

First, watch how the waves roll in towards the beach. They gain height, swell like heavily pregnant bellies; skin stretched tight, yearning to give birth as they push on towards the shore. The energy from the wind of Martinique has bowled across the deep Atlantic Ocean uninterrupted. Here, as the land shallows, the base of the ball of energy drags against the seabed. Tripped up, like a bully’s meanly placed foot in a school playground, the waves rear up and topple forward into a chaos of noise and foam, dragging at pebbles or sand in a clawing frenzy of dispersing energy.