After the very strong cold winds of the last few days the weather eased today and I was able to clean the underwater camera. The filamentous algae is now growing quickly and the camera has to be cleaned at least every two weeks or we lose the picture! The pontoon housing the camera is now very colourful with assorted algae, sponges and other organisms. However, still no shore crabs or gobies to be seen along the edge of the Fleet channel. The only fish seen was one grey mullet. The underwater visibility was still only moderate. It typically takes 2-3 days for all the sediment to come out of the water column after a period of very strong winds.

The water temperature was 8.5C. The water is normally at its coldest in mid-February, but this year there is still no sign of the water starting to warm in late-March. Look at the CMMP pages on the website for the full plot of water temperature.

Above the water, there were a number of oystercatchers along the Fleet foreshore, and the dandelions are in full flower on the grassy area on Chesil Beach.

On a freezing cold, extremely windy Easter Saturday 29 people braved the elements to go fossil hunting around Tidmore Point. We were mainly looking for ammonites but didn't object to finding other fossils. Almost everyone was rewarded with am ammonite but most of us had to settle for small ones. One young man, however, found a beautiful pyritised kosmoceras (8cm in diameter). It made my 4 cm one look small, but its still my best find yet - oh the lucky lad! Plenty of belemnites, gryphea, worm casts and smoe small but complete oxytoma were also found.

Last Tuesday saw the first school visit of the year. 21 year 12's from the Arthur Terry School came and spent a few hours here studying the geomorphology of the beach. After a guided tour and lunch they went off to measure the profile of the beach. This was actually a bit special as the storms the previous week had washed away most of the ledges making the  profile very steep indeed! 

Underwater visibility fairly poor after the storms earlier this week. Water temperature 9.3C. Several two-spot gobies seen on the camera, and one corkwing wrasse.

The very high tide last monday came very close to the exceptionally high tide of November 2005. A few more inches and the instrumentation system would have been flooded.

The weather earlier in the week caused significant over-topping of Chesil Beach with the strandline well down the landward side of the beach in places along the stretch of the beach at Ferrybridge. This did not result in any of the canns opening. This over-topping probably occurred on tuesday night/wednesday morning. The seaward slope of the beach has been swept clear of marine litter.

Nothing too exciting swept up, quite a few whelk shells, plus the usual collection of angling discards i.e. light sticks, fishing line, and tackle, also a good selection of timber. Only isolated lumps of fresh oil were found.

Two swallows, possibly more, seen on Chesil Beach on friday afternoon. Also seen on Chesil Beach the first clumps of Portland Pinks about to flower and the scurvy grass in full flower.

Can spring be far away now?

Ed

It's spring tides again so must be time to clean the underwater camera again. The tide was exceptionally low with the camera mounting cross-bar only just below the surface so camera cleaning was easy. The excellent underwater visibility also helped. The algae is growing fast with the whole pontoon, including the camera, covered in a new growth of brown filamentous algae. At this time of year this really needs to be cleaned every week, but the low water temperature and poor weather has prevented this on neap tides. The water temperature should now start to increase as spring advances and within a few weeks it should be possible to resume the weekly cleaning.

The water temperature today was 9.6C.

Although the visibility was very good and the algae very colourful, there was little else about. The usual group of two-spot gobies in the camera wreck were in evidence with about a dozen seen, but away from the wreck there was very little with only one shore crab seen and no other fish.

Walking back along Chesil Beach revealed the first few spring flowers with a few Portland pinks in flower and many scurvy grass flowers.