You wade only to the knees, south of the bar’s inner edge, where the kelp lifts and lies down like slow breathing.

It is not a pasture for horses. It is a nursery. Between the blades, fish no longer than your thumb hang in little flocks. Bigger shadows move farther out. A seal’s head pops, looks at you as if you were a rude chair, and goes under without drama.

“Storm-buffer,” Pip says, surprising you by sounding like Pell. “Blades take the punch. Town takes less.”

You think of Wren’s extra nets dropped here now, before the spring-storm, and the thumb-fish going to market as if the pantry had no door.

The kelp does not enter the foam-horse’s line. It lives in the darker water south, stitched to rock. Break the stitch—tear the beds, crowd the Stack, lock a skin—and the picture loses a corner.

Wind piles a higher wavelet. Pell’s word surge arrives in your bones: wind can shove a whole field of water onto a coast, and if that coast is already standing on a spring flood, the field has extra legs.

You can follow that surge-thought to the old mark on Grey Stack.

Or you can take the nursery to the people who still think water is empty until it has a horse in it.