When we first bought the lake house we were told that there were five beaches around the lake: children’s beach; spur beach; moon beach; north beach; and park beach. Needless to say in the almost five years we’ve been here I’ve been to all of them.

However, I was walking the dog around the lake (about three miles) the other day when I noticed the sign above. I’d seen it before, but I’d never tried to take a photograph of this mysterious sixth beach. The thing is I’ve never seen it open. The sign in the picture below reads “Beach Closed”. It’s always there, even in Summer, so I guess that this particular beach has been closed permanently.

Other beaches have also been closed from time to time, sometimes for short periods either because of something unpleasant in the water; or for longer periods because they don’t come up to some bureaucratic town code. This does not usually deter people form visiting them though.

I’ve never seen people at cardiac beach. There must be some story behind this, but I don’t know what it is. Admittedly it has some things working against it. The entrance to it is near the top of a quite steep hill (hence the name I imagine). Unlike the other beaches there’s no parking. And it’s a pretty steep descent down to the water. I wonder if something happened there once? Did somebody run down the steps you see in the picture, fall and injure themselves? But then why leave the ‘Cardiac Beach’ sign? This seems to suggest that at some point (possibly after some work has been done?) it might re-open. It’s not obvious from this Winter picture, but there’s actually very little (if any) beach there. It seems to be more of a boat launching area than anything else – although you’d have to be quite brave to try to get a boat down there.