Our Backyard Beach

It is really good to enjoy the sea for free, almost a daily summer get-away whenever the weather gets too hot and refreshing has become a necessity, and is just at our backyard. Not everyone gets to enjoy having one, lolz. It's an open sea, with growing mangroves, by the shore, planted to encourage fish fries. Sea bed is muddy and is not without blemish. It's an ordinary seafront where you will see a lot of garbage that drifts ashore.

Unlike public beaches, we need to clean the area -collect the garbages, drift woods, luggage, plastics and all sort of things that drifts ashore, -shoes, slippers, clothes and a lot more. Though we are able to collect seaweeds too.

Mangroves and acasia robusta thrives by the shore. The kind of acasia that has about 2 inches thorns on its stems. We have to trim it as it is dangerous to leave the stems untrimmed, especially when kids are playing around. We burn the trimmed stems to prevent it from accidentally injure anyone coming in the area. Then, we need to rid the mangroves of the things that hangs on their branches, most of them are plastic bags, slippers and shoes. I could not imagine where all those garbage went that were thrown at the sea because we found a bunch of them hanging on mangroves, -a perfect display of plastics and cellophanes, accessorized by shoes and sleepers.

It is true, so much effort and it is a big effort that you'll find yourself exhausted after a day cleaning the area. It isn't easy. We burn all the garbage we collected, many of them are really heavy to transport and be collected by local garbage collectors. The drifted wood that we collected are used at our dirty kitchen or use it to place my orchids on, oh, these are heavy to lift. Need help from men to carry it over to our place. As for the seaweeds, they are used as fertilizers. Have to dry them first before using. I grow sequa (loofah) on the bed of seaweeds and they were gigantic. Mama's ingredient to her vegetable stew that helps alleviate high blood pressure. I tried to grow raddish but I really failed, horribly.

Oh! Oh! Oh! after all the hardwork, well tadang! the place is neat and clean ready for our swims or dips. Truly, I cannot say that we rid all the garbage, but it looks better now, than before we did the cleaning. If you go around the area, you will notice some fish fries swimming about in groups because the water is clear. The water only gets muddy when you step on the sea floor because of the mud. If you further look around, there are a lot of crustaceans lurking about in different colors. Even my boys are enticed to catch some because of the attracting colors. They spend hours playing, catching, swimming together with some friends. They even climb up the mangrove trees and jump, others do acrobatics as they jumped. Play chase on the water. They are simply having fun. And truly indeed, it is fun watching them.

It was a nice area to hang out during the night. Water was warm. We once did our diner there with some friends. We had grilled pork and kinilaw. Just enjoying the sand and the water. We sat by sand and the kids were running around chasing each other and at the same time, bathe or swim. Me, I just dipped my legs to relieve stress.

The sandbar. It was not long ago the sandbar was located about 50-100 meters ahead. But it got closer due to a strong typhoon (Yolanda) that passed thru Cebu that time. Sandbar formed got nearer. We were very glad that planting mangrove did pushed thru as they protected us from sea waters and wild wind when strong typhoon hit our place.

We are grateful because even with ordinary rain with strong winds, you will really hear the wind whistles even if its just about 100 meters afar. Its really scary to hear it, especially with my boys.

Ahh! Love to share more, perhaps on the next story. Thank you so much for reading. God bless. * Photo credits are mine, boys on the picture are my sons. Location: Liloan, Brgy Cotcot, Cebu.