BLOGS

BLOGS

Going where no Blue Recovery has gone before

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A change of scenery for Blue Recovery, in its two-year mission to explore new watery worlds. 

With the drizzly weather a welcome break from Friday’s blistering heat, Plymouth’s fourth Blue Recovery Beach Day began at the historic Royal William Yard. 

South West SUP‘s ‘The Shack‘, did us proud with some incredibly delectable cakes for everyone. Opposite, our Mobile Rock Pool (MRP) was stationed, patiently waiting to play host to our second ‘See Our Shore’ event. After our much welcomed refreshments, we headed over to the iconic Mills Bakery building in Royal William Yard for an introduction to the day. 

A change in location was not the only new item on the menu, as our Rock Pool Families received their brand new ‘Beach Day Activity Booklets. Put together by some of our amazing volunteers and staff, our children’s activity booklet is full of fun, educational activities to guide budding Rock Pool Explorers on some great adventures. With each beach day having a different focus, they can explore every inch of Plymouth’s rocky shore & learn along the way. This month’s activity theme: Crabs!

At the Beach

Our intrepid explorers kicked off their rock pooling for the day on Firestone Bay’s high shore.

To break in their activity booklets our rock pool families started on the upper stretches of the shore before making their way down to the mid and lower reaches of the beach, counting every crab they found along the way. ‘Counting Crabs’ made for a great introduction to citizen science and scientific methods. Meanwhile, our adult citizen scientists set out to conduct a crab abundance survey, comparing numbers of various crab species on the high and mid shore, and also between Firestone Bay and our usual haunt of Mount Batten beach. All whilst keeping an eye out for the unusual and mesmerising…

As well as finding quite a few crabs (including some beautifully patterned shore crabs like the one below left), we found a green sea urchin (middle left), a small jellyfish (middle right) and a long clawed porcelain crab (right).

sea urchin

See Our Shore

Sunday saw our second ‘See Our Shore’ event in Plymouth. Our ‘See Our Shore’ beach days are a great way of encouraging our participants to show off the amazing and diverse marine wildlife found around Plymouth’s National Marine Park

Returning from the beach to the gorgeous Royal William Yard, with some of the wildlife we found carefully in tow with filled our mobile rock pool with fresh sea water and all gathered round for a quick look before we “officially” started showing off our shore to curious passers by!

Luckily, the drizzly weather didn’t put off everyone from coming over to have a look the mesmerising marine life that can be found right here on our doorstep in Britain’s Ocean City! It was a superb way to end the day and, I for one, can’t wait for the rest of our Summer ‘See Our Shore’  beach days. 

Thank you to everyone who came along despite the turn in weather, it was a great day. 

Another thank you to our team for helping to make the day so great!

Finally, a massive thank you to our volunteer Brett (@brettlphotography) and Ryan from Fotonow for taking some amazing photographs, sound clips & film!

Images from the day:

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