Deadly surf complete with battering rams. Scary.

I couldn't run with shoes on at the weekend because of a massive blister on my heel, due to stupidly wearing a new pair of running shoes without socks.

I thought, some salt water will help it and I can enjoy a barefoot run on the beach.

So I went to Portsea 'back' beach (Portsea is on a very narrow peninsula with a gentle north-facing bay beach, ideal for swimming, on one side and one of the most dangerous ocean beaches in the world on the other).

Man, was it wild! The tide was in and the waves were washing right up to the top of the sand. The beach has quite a severe rake and so that when the tide is in and you on are the beach, the waves appear to build up several storeys high - they tower over you, it is quite frightening. (This is the area where Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt was drowned on a solo swim in 1967.)

There were not many people on the beach, just a few rugged up in coats, scarves, hats, boots, gloves etc. Fails me how you could actually walk along whilst in that get-up. It wasn't that cold, maybe 10 or 11 degrees - Celsius. Plus there were a couple of kids scampering about with some dogs.

It was late afternoon and the heavy black clouds were occasionally broken by flashes of sun which reflected off the water to create a kind of blinding light diffused by the spray. You know, like the apocalyse.

So I'm running up the beach imagining the apocalypse, with giant waves breaking and threatening to wash me out to sea. I ran to one end of the beach, then to the other end - the stretch is bookmarked by rocky caves which jut out into the water.

While I was running, I saw three or four huge timber posts being washed in further along the beach. You totally would not want to be in the way when those babies came barrelling through the surf like battering rams. They were about ten feet long. (Actually, there is a mention in one of the links above about the possibility of PM Holt having been hit by flotsam and jetsam. Or one of the two, I can never remember which is which!) By the time I reached the logs, they were sitting there motionless on the sand and I nimbly leapt over them.

The run was probably only about six kilometres all up, but hard work sinking into the sand and dodging tidal waves. Then I stripped off my T-shirt and ran into the foaming water. But not too far!

And then home to a hot bath.