A Blowout in the Primary Dune
I’ve had the pleasure – for a great many years – of fishing long sandy strands, running to the horizon, backed by rolling dunes. These are beautiful places, places you come to love, quiet worlds unto their own. And in time you learn their terminology – the whack line, the backbeach, the foreshore, primary dunes, secondary dunes, longshore bars, longshore currents, backwashes, and cusps. All is known to you.
One of the most usual things you find is a “blowout”, a hole or hollow in the primary dune – the dune closest to the beach. In the image above, an angler descends into the largest “blowout” I have ever seen. At its bottom, the walls towered well overhead, as if you were in a private sanctum. But it was coming off the beach in the wee hours of the night, that this canyon made its strongest impression. And I would always stop for a moment, swallowed by the dunes, to watch the stars overhead.
