In short, the Tour de France spent Saturday in the heartland with its mixed smells of smoke from spectators' cookouts, barnyard aromas, fresh tar on roads newly paved for the Tour and the sourness of low tide on the English Channel.
The Pacific has big tides and on Contadora, low tide is a dramatic sight, tripling the size of beaches and turning rocky shorelines into steep cliffs.
The beaches are sandy and pleasant for sitting on at low tide, with breakwaters every 100 metres or so that also act as windbreaks.
Because of how quickly the river swells when the ocean tide reaches its mouth, the window for safely fording it was even smaller: two hours — one hour before and one hour after low tide, which on that day was near sunset.
In 1937 Collins first exhibited at the Royal Academy, submitting a pen-and-ink drawing entitled Riverside, Chiswick, of two houseboats on the mud at low tide on the Thames.
This system was mainly neotectonically controlled, occupying a depressed area bounded by faults on a Palaeozoic rocky lower platform, today observable on beaches at low tide.
The rocky shores are considered one of the most dynamic ecosystems on the planet, exposed to the hot sun for hours on end at low tide and then battered by waves for the rest of the day at high tide.
"The best place to find fossils is on the beach at low tide, not on the cliffs, where there is an increased risk of rock fall".
It's situated 200m off the south coast of Devon and can be reached on foot at low tide, but it's much more fun ploughing through the waves at high tide in a sea tractor.
A Ram public relations team taking pictures of a prototype 2014 Ram pickup found this out when the truck got stuck on rocks at low tide at Moonstone Beach, in Northern California.
