Thrilling sea dramatics at cave entrance, Beeny Cliff south end

Reverberant altercations between sea and cliff clefts and prominences, also with entertaining collisions between incoming waves with rebound waves surging out of the cave. A wonderful dark and menacing reverberance imparted by the cave and the immediate cliff surrounds of the cave's vestibule area.

We're precariously overlooking the vestibule area of the southernmost more or less west-facing caves of Beeny Cliff, near Boscastle, Cornwall, UK, listening to an intricate drama of impacts, roars and big splash-downs.

I'd produced some excellent earlier recordings closely overlooking the particular cave entrance and 'vestibule' area, but this recording, made on 24 February 2019, is much more dramatic than any of those, apart from two early recordings that found the sea so wild that they made poor listening because of the pretty unremitting assault on the ears.

Here the dramatics, with much reverberating booming and rumbling, with splashdowns from spray plumes sometimes big enough to make a menacing roar, go about as far as I'd really want for an extended listen.

I made the recording, as on previous occasions, from the little exposed rock platform closely overlooking the cave vestibule, looking across it, with the cave entrance to right. A great plus point is that we can distinctly hear the trickling of a little streamlet on the rocks just behind the recorder, for the latter can hear sounds most of the way round behind it. That gives an enhanced sense of perspective, like a foreground object in a photo.

Actually I had a Zoom H5 recorder with H6 mic module recording closely next to this one, as one of my side-by-side comparisons to see if there was any advantage in my using that nearest Zoom equivalent to the Sony D100.

It turned out that although the Zoom recordings were superficially still more impressive in all the detail that jumped out at one, really that difference was because the Zoom mics were too directional and gave poor integration of left and right channels, so all the details were too prominent and 'separate'. So I discarded all the Zoom recordings I made, and sold the recorder.

Full length of recording is 192', but I cut that down a little for the Freesound upload.

Advisory
For realistic sound, this needs a playing volume of 3dB above a sensible normal listening level.

This recording taking place, on fairly dangerously exposed cliff ledge, whose rock (slate) readily gets slippery (Yikes!). The Zoom recorder is the left-hand one.

Also during this recording, from slightly higher position — what happens when an energetic incoming wave hits an energetic rebound wave surging out of the cave — and I saw the occasional eruption reach something towards twice that height during this session! You can hear plenty of splash-downs from such impacts as well as impacts of waves as they surge into clefts in the cliff.

Techie stuff:
The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with three nested custom Windcut furry windshields, placed on a standard-size Zipshot tripod.

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.

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!