Seaward aspect of Boscastle blowhole system — another blowhole!

The unsung Boscastle blowholes!

It's weird! The Boscastle Harbour blowhole is so well-known, yet I've still not found mention anywhere 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 what appears to be blowhole activity.

As well as the loud stuff on the left from around the back end of the well-known Boscastle Harbour blowhole, something is going on directly below this recorder. — And when the loud whoomphy booms to left give over as the tide changes further, the activity transfers to here, with subterranean booms immediately below us, each followed by a jet of spray. I never saw those jets, but their splashdowns were very audible.

I made this recording from mid-afternoon on 2 October 2016, just below an unofficial narrow dead-end track that contours the north-west / north slope of Penally Hill, a little way north-east along it.

I also made a concurrent recording (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/687288/ ), which captured much more fully the loud whoomphy booms from around what I take to be the back end of the harbour blowhole.

Advisory

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

This recording in progress.  Seems steeper than it appears in the photo below, and quite tricky to place and retrieve the recorder!

This recording in progress, from above the precariously-placed concurrent recorder. The arrow points to the position of this recorder.

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!