Seaward aspect of Boscastle blowhole system — whoomphy booms aplenty!

Whoomphy booms aplenty!

It's weird! The Boscastle Harbour blowhole is so well-known, yet I've still not found mention of blowhole activity on the other (seaward) side of Penally Hill (and Penally Point), which bounds the north side of the harbour. Yet when I've investigated that seaward side of the hill I've found various centres of blowhole activity. This appears to be the loudest, and I'm not clear as to what extent jets of spray come out this side from those impressive whoomphy booms, for the rugged shape of the cliff along here, cut by various caves, hides a lot of the most audible events from view.

This particular very loud cave action seems to me to coincide reasonably with where I'd expect the harbour blowhole would be getting its intake, but for all I know, it might be an independent phenomenon.

As well as the loud stuff on the right, there are often discreet breathy sounds to the left, which are suggestive of incipient blowhole activity there — probably requiring different swell / tide conditions for it to really make its mark.

I made this recording from mid-afternoon on 2 October 2016, on the seaward side of the 'neck' connecting Penally Point with the bulk of Penally Hill. Looking down the slabs of slate, I could see a little protruding rock platform on the apparent (low) cliff edge, inviting me very cautiously to get down there and set a recorder going, so it would get the loud dramatics on the right and other sea actions on both sides.

I also made a concurrent recording, which captured some of this soundscape on the left, with definite and different-sounding blowhole activity immediately below that recorder. The latter's exact position was (in the second photo) on the skyline of the steep grassy slope of Penally Hill (towards top right), on or very close to the slight prominence on that slope just above the bit of distant coastline (near Crackington Haven).

Advisory

High-grade headphones are strongly recommended in order to hear all the detail and reproduce the very low frequencies reasonably correctly.

An earlier photo (9 January 2013) of this recording's position. Ignore the foreground recorder; the arrow points to what I think must be the recorder position for this time round. — Yes, looks quite scary from this viewpoint, though it wasn't quite as suicidal as it looks in this view — indeed, I've seen anglers using it!

This recording in progress (bottom left). It required some care to negotiate the slaty slabs to get down here to the cliff edge!

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.

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