This was one of those stages that I sort of guessed how long it would take. Unlike with the H2H, where I was obsessive about working out how much ascent and descent and distance each day's hike comprised, this time I was a little um, well, lazy. I had two books which gave times between various points along the way, and I roughly interpolated to come up with estimates for the stretches we actually did. In some cases the hikes we did were the same as those in the books (e.g., Clovelly to Hartland Quay), in other cases, such as today, they weren't. So, it was perhaps just as well that even my estimated time for today was long (7.25 hours), because as a result Thomas and Suzi opted to take the day off (walking around Bude and Boscastle) rather than hike. Actually the true estimated length should probably have been around 8.5 hours....
The remaining four of us (Russ, Francoise, Jean-Paul, and I) started around 9:30 under lovely skies -- cirrus and another type of cloud whose name I don't know but that looks like wedding dress trains in the sky. After a half an hour along the beach in Widemouth Bay we started to climb above cliffs and soon felt once again far from the world. Sea, rocks, gorse, broom, heather, fields, and cattle... that was about all we saw. No houses, almost no boats, an occasional road, and very few people.
The path had a lot of ups and downs today -- about 1250m, I worked out, using the map, after the hike -- and at 21km it wasn't short. We made it to Crackington Haven (a little less than half of the way) in four hours, but it was clear that Francoise was tiring and also finding the increasing winds troublesome. While enjoying a late cream tea lunch, I looked at the map and realized that at the current pace we probably had 5 hours still to go... it was time for an executive decision. I "suggested" to Francoise and Jean-Paul that given the situation, they might prefer to take transportation to Boscastle and walk around there rather than hike the rest of the way... and they agreed. So, Russell and I set off at 2:10PM by ourselves.
I'm in pretty good shape at this point -- both from the hiking and from working out and losing weight from Jan to April, as is, for similar reasons, Russell, so we went fast, finishing the hike in 3 hours. The pace might have been a little fast for Russell -- at any rate he did say with a slight edge at one point that he thought we were hiking faster than we did on the H2H (and I think he was right!), but he soldiered through anyway and we arrived in Boscastle at 5:10PM footsore and tired, but quite pleased with ourselves for what we had achieved.
There were one "interesting" moment along the trail today. At one point we went along the edge of a field in which a herd of cows was grazing... one of which was not a cow. It was, I realized about half way across the field, a huge, concuspicent, double muscled bull, which both during and after a momentary dalliance with one of the cows eyed us, and I thought me in particular with what seemed like disfavour. Not good. There was a thin wire fence -- one wire -- between the herd and us, but that looked as if it might stop the bull for, oh, a micro-second or so. Very not good. I looked right to see what would happen if I jumped over the edge of the cliff... pretty steep drop... and the next stile was about 80 meters off uphill. Pretty much maxed out the not-goodness at that point. But fortunately the bull decided that we weren't worth bothering about and lumbered slowly off. Oof.
