There was no denying the fact that Sally Satnav was in a playful mood. Ever since Wadebridge had disappeared from the rear view mirror, our friendly navigation aid had beseeched us to take almost every available left hand turn, many of them along improbable looking single winding lanes flanked with those famous eight feet tall Cornish hedgerows, where meetings with oncoming tractors would be almost guaranteed. And at each turn, Lloyd, who was driving would say “yes?” and I’d respond “no, not this one” as we pushed on along the A39, or the Atlantic Highway as some tourist mandarin had long since dubbed it, giving the road a sense of romantic adventure that the reality doesn’t quite match up to. Like it or not, Sally was going to be foiled in her attempts to take us to Trebarwith Strand via the Delabole turn off for the near vertical switchback descent that we now call Pellatt’s Hill. You’ll have to ask Steve about that if you want to know more. I’d driven that hill once before, on my only other visit here, and I was in no hurry to repeat the experience, especially when there was a perfectly good road down to the sea just a little further on. Besides which, we’d come armed with two flaky steak pasties that had been liberated from my local branch of Cornish Oven, and although they were demonstrating an admirable degree of heat retention during the hour long drive here, we didn’t want to waste any time collecting parts of the underside of Lloyd’s car from the road when we could be tucking into what would already be a late lunch.
Finally, we arrived at the outskirts of Camelford. “Yes?” came the now familiar question from the driver. “Yes” came the required response from the navigator as I consulted the map on my phone one last time. From here it was a short and easy roll down to the coast on a road where we would not need to stop to recover discarded exhaust components as we headed for the object of our third outing together of the week. I was glad that Lloyd was keen to take a trip to Trebarwith. My previous visit had been earlier in the year on the Mayday bank holiday, when I’d been here with non-photographers. Despite this it had turned out to be a more than satisfactory outing, yielding some very pleasing results, and I was eager to come here again with a similarly minded soul whose mission was exactly the same as my own. Two missions in fact – the first of them being to devour those pasties before they began to turn cold. It was the first time I’d had one for some months and I’d forgotten how good they are.
Rumbling stomachs silenced, we made the short walk from the car park down to the water, where there were a couple of hours of happy shooting ahead of us before high tide and last light would come along in short succession, just like those proverbial buses. Unlike my previous visit, we were the only photographers here, a distinct positive in a location where the battleground for space is extremely limited on a high tide. And despite the absence of colour in the sky, the clouds offered plenty of texture on another grey day where the world almost seemed to exist in monochrome. In each shot we took, there was only just the merest hint of blue in the sea to tell us otherwise. We began on the low ledge to the left hand side of this narrow entrance to the water’s edge between the cliffs, more than once being caught as an incoming wave washed up through the channel and surrounded us. Before long, the fact that my boots are made from Gore-tex was no longer relevant. If a wave comes in over your ankles, it doesn’t matter how waterproof your footwear is. At least we’d already picked up our camera bags and strapped them onto our backs before the contents were treated to a bath and very possibly an unwanted sea voyage as well. Soggy socks can be lived with for an afternoon, but salty lenses are rather more of a problem.
By the time they arrived, we’d moved back onto the central platform where the likelihood of further foot spa experiences was much reduced. Firstly, one or two togs appeared at our backs, and before long it seemed as many as ten of us might be competing for space, just as had happened last time I was here. Suddenly a camera appeared uncomfortably close to my left ear. And then another on the right. It seemed that a workshop from Sweden had joined us, the leader of which seemed to be discussing the location with a Londoner, as if he were the local knowledgebase. They were heading for Hartland next, so I told them about Blackchurch Rock, a location to test anyone’s mettle on a winter’s afternoon. Ten togs slipping around on the Toblerone shaped rocks down there together would have been interesting if they’d added it to the itinerary. Somebody suggested we all move back to create more space as the water approached its highest point, but neither Lloyd nor I, who by dint of our early arrival had the ringside seats were ready to engage reverse gear just yet. We’d been here for nearly two hours by now and felt we’d earned these moments. In compromise we crouched for as long as two pairs of knees in their late fifties could manage. The forest of cameras behind us were by now mostly mounted on fully extended tripods, as like a press pack hunting an A list celebrity we clicked away frantically at the view before us.
And just as quickly as they’d arrived, the forest at our backs vanished into thin air, very probably making for the pub that hovers over these rocks on the left hand cliff side. Now it was just us, daylight slipping imperceptibly into the blue hour as the apertures widened and the ISO levels were raised until it was time to call it a day. Another very pleasing day at Trebarwith despite the challenges that come with a high tide shoot here. Once again it had been great to spend time with somebody who was once an acquaintance, but is now a good friend with a shared love of seascape adventures and pasties. And a healthy disregard for instructions offered by errant satellite navigation systems of course.
