WEDNESDAY WALK: Playing amongst the massive Tidal Variations in Cuxhaven, Germany

Hello everybody on HIVE and especially the Wednesday Walk Community! My name is Jasper and usually I write to you from Cape Town, South Africa. I am now back in Cape Town after a lovely work trip to Northern Germany last week.

I work for a South African division of a German renewable energy company. Last week, everybody in the Cape Town office went to Germany to meet some of our main colleagues there. Other divisions from other markets (Spain, Panama, Canada, Sweden, Poland, Turkey, USA, etc) all came together to have a company party on a ship near the end of the week as well - the company party first since Covid-19 started, and so it was a happy time for us all to finally meet one another.

The ship that the party was on set off from a town called Cuxhaven, which is on the Southern bank of the mouth of the Elbe river, about 2 hours west of Hamburg by train. Let's have a look around together?

Compared to Hamburg, Cuxhaven is a quaint little coastal harbour town

Looking north across the Elbe river towards Husum, etc - you can see the vast wind turbine farms that we visited earlier in the week. Want to see inside one of these turbines as well as the view from the top? Look here: @jasperdick/renewable-energy-what-does-it

We were lucky to visit the beach at high tide on a sunny afternoon, when the water was right up close to the beach

This means we were able to have a surprisingly warm swim - the water felt like at least 20degC! Our theory is that the water recedes at low tide and the sand gets very hot, and then warms up the water when it returns at low tide

How much lower is low tide? About 2-3m metres depending on the moon... and the land is very flat so this means that the sea recedes a great distance, even kilometres in some places! Here we are with colleagues from the Polish team taking a horse cart ride to a place that is usually an island at high tide! We were allowed to look around the island for about 1 hour before making our escape back to the mainland!

We visited the swimming beach again at a lower tide - this time the light blue water is ankle deep and you would have to walk several football fields out to the darker water beyond the point to think of swimming!

So we had a great time in Cuxhaven, even before we include the staff party on the ship, which was actually very fun as well!

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