It has been far too hot recently, and mostly we have done very little.  But on Sat evening and Sunday evening we bestirred ourselves to catch the tide.

It was too hot for energetic paddling on Saturday.  We found a saltmarsh on the Bere Peninsula, had a picnic and then mooched very gently around it enjoying the cool of the water and what cloud there was. 



We saw a great number of jellyfish back in the main river, but photographing jellyfish with a phone camera seemed doomed to disappointment so I didn't even try.


Slightly cooler on Sunday evening, and very still, so we decided to go to sea.   Well, Plymouth, anyway, which being sheltered by the outer breakwater is suitably calm and easy paddling for our canoe, which is very much Not A Sea Canoe.

We saw two peregrine falcons!  Really close, too though sadly I only had my old phone camera with me and it's very much not designed for photographing birds as you can see from the two dots sitting on the rocks below...



You can see how clear the water was approaching these caves.  It was full of long reaching tendrils of waterweed that were just a little bit too like tentacles...


And here's a view from the little cove we explored, the phone has made it look a bit more sunsetty than it was.  We got back to the quay just after sunset, it was still very light.


This is more what it looked like an hour or so later, when the sun was really setting and we were coming back towards Plymouth Hoe.  You can just see the stripy shape of the Smeaton's Tower lighthouse and the war memorial behind it.

We went shopping in Plymouth yesterday.  It was lunchtime by the time we got there, so we parked on the Barbican, right next to the harbour and went for lunch.  Pp had styled his facial hair in the manner of a star-fish.  I am not sure if this was some sort of celebration of Plymouth's maritime location or simply coincidence, but it did provoke some comment from passing strangers :-D
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We had a good view of the Mayflower Steps.  They aren't quite where the Mayflower sailed from to take the Pilgrims off to America in 1620: after all, this place was a busy industrial* harbour and working fishing port for hundreds of years, so it's been pretty extensively rebuilt since then.  I'm told that the actual Mayflower probably tied up off to the left of this photo, and that the quay and the steps are all newer. But obviously there is a demand for somewhere for people to go and stand and take photographs of each other celebrating, in some vague way, History, and therefore there is an archway and a sort of a little platform thing to stand on between a UK and a US flag.

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I went with my mother to the Royal William Yard, the old Royal Naval victualling yard in Plymouth this week.   We had a vague plan to visit an artist friend of hers who has a studio in the RWY, but in the end, we couldn't find it.  We had a good afternoon out anyway though.   We loved the amazing flower-banks by the car park, all fluttering with butterflies. 


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This week we ended up going on a Tamar Valley Tourism Association outing.  The idea of these is really that people who run accommodation go out to local attractions and see what is available locally so they can recommend it to guests.  We don't have any guests, but we kind of fancied a boat trip anyway, and we are Tamar Valley Tourism members, so we labelled it 'networking' and went to Plymouth.
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