The Beach of Doom (10 minutes before)

When it rains, it pours!

We decided to have a couple of days at the coast, stay in a nice hotel near the beach and put Ben in kennels after an initial morning run on the beach. Andy had had a tough shift and I had done my first few days at work (will discuss later) and was exhausted, so we felt we deserved a nice break.

Packing my things early on Friday morning I was actually thinking that I wouldn’t have much to report back to England this week, other than my new job. It was at that moment I think I cursed the next few days!

We got to the beach in good time; we had decided to go to the City Beach due to it being nearer to the kennels. This beach is one of the southern Mackay beaches where the tide goes out for miles and it is very flat. The tide was well out when we got there so we let Ben off and he raced across the sand in search of the sea. There were lots of small pools along the way where Ben would race into and get himself as wet as possible. Then I noticed him lift his front paw up and thought he must have something stuck in his foot. When we got to him there was blood dripping from his paw - his back pad on his front paw had been sliced in half, and it was a very deep cut. We needed to get him straight to the vets so we turned back and headed straight along the sand to get back to the car. Ben was being so good, he kept laying down and licking the blood wondering what it was. There were bloody footprints all along the sand!

The beach had areas of darker sand which just looked as though it was still wet from the sea. In the photo above you can see Andy is walking on the edge of a patch of darker sand. We headed right into the middle of one of these patches. As we were racing along our feet were sticking slightly in the sand (a bit like the muddy Glastonbury experience this year!), we kept on going but then it got worse and we were sinking past our ankles. We decided to turn and go across to some dryer sand about 15-20m away, but it just got worse and worse and we eventually were just past our knees when we tried to walk. I was absolutely hysterical by this point and was screaming from sheer terror, one of my worst fears is being buried alive and I seriously though that was going to happen. There was nobody at all on the beach apart from us, so I had visions of us sinking until just our heads were showing and then the tide slowly coming in to finish us off! Poor Ben was flapping about with blood pouring from his foot not understanding why we had decided to bury ourselves in the sand, I was screaming and Andy was crawling along. Eventually we started hitting dryer/firmer sand and pulled ourselves to safety.
It was the most terrifying experience I have ever had and I just burst into tears when we got out of it!