New Year's Day "afterburner"

What a great first day in 2009!
"Severe" sunshine in combination with mostly dead calm in the deep south of our favourite island - at the sandy beach & dunes and most southern Sylt island point called Hoernum Odde.
A happy coincidence - a whim of fate / auspicious sign? - washed up a head of a red rose out of the sea right to the part of the beach next to the tetrapods we stood.

The Sylt tetrapods, the four-legged concrete breakwaters, at Hoernum beach. Designed to dissipate the force of incoming waves by allowing water to flow around rather than against them. They were put down to several sections of the Sylt's sandy beaches as a coastal protection measure. But the effect was not really and everywhere the protection of the coast. By changing the direction of the flow of the water they indeed exacerbate the loss of the sand here and there.
Nowadays they are a kind of monument at Hoernum beach and a popular subject of photographers of course.

Photo session "free-of-jackets" at Hoernum beach with our "sea rose" and an old World War II bunker in the rear, that was washed free of the Hoernum Odde dunes during the last half of a year.