Writhing and booming sea around Shag Rock headland, Perranporth — from low wall

The tide is too high for many waves to break here this time, but we have a general writhing sea commotion, with lots of glorious deep booms and heavy, subterranean-seeming rumbles from waves meeting the main cliff below, normally without breaking but still often sending up impressive eruptions of spray from the various impacts. The blowhole on the tip of the the Shag Rock headland does sound occasionally, but isn't very loud this time and so might escape notice. Somewhere in the middle of the recording a group of larger waves come in, which do break, giving a sense of real drama then.

I made this recording on 8 February 2017 on the main cliff slope just to south-west of the Shag Rock headland, near Perranporth, Cornwall, UK, on a decrepit vegetated low drystone wall (see photos below), facing out to sea, so with the headland to right of centre, so a wide panorama would be captured, of sea interactions with the main cliff running across below me. Although the amount of high drama from large waves breaking was very limited indeed, the writhing sea, with all the rumbles and booms as the sea interacted with the cliff base made this an awe-inspiring experience for me to be there and allow myself to be a spellbound audience of one to Mother Nature's sea-action spectacle.

Advisory

Because of the soundscape's big dynamic range, to get a realistic sound level the playing volume needs to be set at some 6dB above a normal sensible level. In addition, high-grade headphones are strongly recommended in order to hear all the detail and reproduce the very low frequencies reasonably correctly.

This recording taking place, at the point where the group of crazy-large waves blustered in. The recorder's just visible on right, perched on the low drystone wall; at this scale its tripod is very difficult to make out, though at least one can see the black furry windshield. The big wave has almost engulfed the tip of the Shag Rock headland.

Earlier photo (22 October 2012), of the decrepit low drystone wall. For this recording the recorder, on its tripod, was on a slightly less inclined patch on the wall's top, just off to the right of this view. — And yes, this is getting entertainingly, precariously steep, so great care was required around there! ("Oops, he's fallen in the water!", as they say!)

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields — the inner being a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, and the outer a custom Windcut one —, and it was placed on a mini-size Zipshot tripod.

* Note that I WARN AGAINST use of windshields that are of any sort of box shape, for I soon found that they were inherently unsuitable for any decent-quality recording. While no doubt non-box-shaped windshields from Movo would be okay, the presence of relatively flat surfaces, edges and corners creates internal narrow resonance peaks in the treble, which give the latter an abrasive and rather 'screamy' quality, no matter who's made the particular windshields.  When I realized why my recordings had developed that nasty treble quality I had to go back through all recordings made with that dratted box-shaped windshield, and use Voxengo CurveEQ to enable me to precisely neutralize two narrow treble peaks and thus enable the recordings to sound wonderfully natural rather than bafflingly stressful.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields and correction for the D100's weakness in very low bass — and then, later on, the aforementioned remedial EQ measure using Voxengo CurveEQ to remove the two narrow treble peaks kindly added by that rogue model of furry windshield.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!