On One Fatty Beach Ride

The weather over the last couple of weeks has been very windy. An extraordinarily low pressure system rolled off the Atlantic on Christmas eve and it seems that the winds have been gusting to 60mph, and a lot more, since.

Saturday was a bit brighter although the bitter wind continued. I didn't fancy fighting my way along the road on the Long Haul Trucker so I took the Fatty for a beach ride instead.

The above photo shows one of the grin inducing features of a fat bike. It still gets me every time I cycle off a firm surface onto soft sand. The front wheel should tuck in and I should be over the bars but the fat tyres just float and I can't help smiling.

Fly wasn't smiling though, as the wind whipped up a stinging blasts of sand.

The observant will notice that the Fatty is in the second lowest gear of the 10 speed cassette. To be honest there were a few times when I was trying to down change a lot further. My legs were taking a pounding just trying to spin away into the wind and I would have liked an extra couple of cogs for climbing the dunes and rocks.

It was still great just to power up the dunes and freewheel down in big arcs. Some places the storms have cut away a lot of the dunes but the beach is always changing and the sand will soon build up somewhere else.

There were a couple trying for sea bass but otherwise the beaches were empty. I cycled as far as I could toward the rock arches but it was getting cold in the shadow of the cliffs and the photos were too dark to use.

An hour or so of playing and I stopped for coffee in the shelter of the marram grass. I needed the hood up on the smock to try to stop the worst of the blown sand. A hard pedal, but good exercise and plenty of smiles.

And on an entirely different matter, my orchid at work has finally bloomed! I have been nurturing this one for about three years. It was close to blooming on Christmas eve and then when I went back into work on Friday it had opened.