Right At the Moment

Thursday morning, 8 AM. Only the Olympic Mountains stand in the clear...

Image from NOAA, thank you very much. (Click for larger image.)

You can even see the fog reaching up the rainforest valleys on the west side, the Hoh, the Queets, the Quinault...

Ships Passing

The air is so thick with moisture; even when it is sunny, the ships are hazy. Monday evening, out on the Hook, there was lots of movement, but no good photos. Ocean Highway was inbound (she's in Tacoma now), Hapag-Lloyd Ludwigshafen Express was outbound. I couldn't figure out what Corpus Christi/Petrochem Supplier was up to, she (they? barge & pusher) kept changing direction—going slowly past, headed straight at the middle of the Hook, no, sideways again—a kind of large industrial dithering that made no sense. When I left they were headed straight away though marinetraffic.com said their destination was Port Angeles. Next morning they were in the harbor, and are still there.

Bulk carrier, barge tanker, container ship; passing each other. The pilot boat is out there somewhere, though you can't see it. 07/26/10 (Click for larger image.)

Clear Overhead, Fog on the Strait

8:50 PM. The incoming ferry must be feeling its way in: sounding its horn over and over.

These Foggy Mornings

Houseguest coming in about 10 days. She somehow imagines that because she is traveling in August it will be warm. So I'm paying attention. Fifty degrees this morning and thick fog. Out at Elwha, still foggy at noon. Sunny now, but still or again foggy in the harbor, temperature 63 degrees.

Cliff Mass had a great image in Monday's post, so I hunted down GOES West 1 km Visible (click to enlarge and center where you want it) for right now (4PM, July 28). Cool. You can even see the wisp of local fog right here:

Afternoon image. (Click for larger image.)

I'll have to look again in the morning. Meanwhile of course it is foggy at First Beach and gloriously sunny on Hurricane Ridge, as it has been all day, since sunrise in fact.

First Beach (Click for larger image.)Hurricane Ridge (Click for larger image.)

In the Museum of Flight (cont.)

This post is for WC, KGS and AB, one of whom I've never met f2f. I think these are the

Curtiss-Robertson Robin C-1 (Click for larger image.)

and the

Granville Brothers Gee Bee Z "City of Springfield" (Click for larger image.)

(The Museum of Flight, Boeing Field, Seattle.)

Paradise for Transportation Geeks

In Seattle for two days. We went twice to Chittenden Locks and watched boats float magically up as the lock filled, while we contemplated Big Engineering in the style of a century ago,

and also watched the salmon in the fish ladder at weir #18, the level where they built an underwater-viewing gallery.

We spent hours in the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field.

Seattle is a paradise for transportation geeks. Planes and boats and trains and freeways, waterfronts and walkable neighborhoods and all.

I was with old old friends (er... actually... former communal spouses). Then they headed back to their respective homes these several decades later,

and me on to visit family in Florida.

Odds are you won't hear from me for a few days.

Daylight Lament

"Duration of day: 15 hours, 36 minutes (2 minutes, 3 seconds shorter than yesterday)," says dateandtime.com. Victoria, BC is less than a quarter of a degree further north than we are (and I can see them from my front windows), so their numbers will do. Alas.

Come Ashore, Come Ashore (again)

Peninsula Daily News has a nice story and a wonderful photo gallery on the canoe landing. Be sure to click on the link for related photos. They got images I only hoped for, and the names of the canoe families...

I don't usually write about the tribe, you may have noticed, feeling that it's not mine to tell about. Happily, the Canoe Journey is a public-is-welcome occasion.

I did my bit to help out yesterday morning, turned up at 4AM to be on the breakfast crew. We fed a lot of people.

Come Ashore, Come Ashore

The canoe journey reached Elwha today. They land right in downtown Port Angeles, east of the city pier on the beach in front of the Red Lion Hotel. This is where the village of Y'Innis was. The whole shore of the Strait belonged to the Klallam then. (1)

Each canoe circles past the greeters on the beach before coming ashore.

Then a speaker in the arriving canoe says who they are and what a long way they've come, that they are tired and hungry, and would like to share songs and stories and fellowship, and requesting permission to come ashore. And the people on shore say who they are, and that the visitors are welcome.

It was still grey and foggy while most of the canoes from the north and south of Puget Sound, and along the shore, came in; by the time the canoes from Canada crossed the Strait the sun was shining. I think there were about 30 canoes, over the course of nearly four hours. Shuttles, and vans, and their own support vehicles were carrying them to the camping areas out on the Rez at Elwha. It's a 2-night stop. The canoes will rest on the beach there in the harbor until Sunday morning.

They're feeding 4,500 people tonight and again tomorrow at Elwha—pullers, support boat crews, the people who break down camp each morning and then drive ahead and have it waiting at the next stop, families, grannies, babies and all. I'm helping cook breakfast, and the breakfast cook said to come at 2AM. I think he meant it, but I'm shooting for 4AM, that will be the best I can do.

This is my favorite part: carrying the canoes up the beach.

Bailey Range in Glory

Up on Hurricane Ridge Tuesday, with W. over from Victoria on the ferry just for a quick visit. I myself am much more likely to go to the ocean unless I have a visitor, but jeez it's glorious up there.

Bailey Range, Mount Olympus peeking up behind (Click for larger image.)Closer up, to see Olympus (Click for larger image.)View from the Base of Hurricane Hill (Click for larger image.)

It required great personal restraint not to title this post with the directive from the sign shown below, "Please go off trail and..." These are introduced mountain goats, right-thinking Park supporters wish they could all be relocated (or something). They eat rare plants. (1)(2)

Trailhead Signage (Click for larger image.)

Two Hours, Two Beaches

Went out with JL to walk her two beaches in Clallam Bay, by COASST's reckoning Slip Point beach and Middle Point beach. The marine layer fog moved to and fro, the conditions we'd have to indicate on our COASST forms changing constantly. No dead birds. Two eagles over Slip Point.

Though we were right in the village of Clallam Bay for the first hour, and then right by the highway a bit further west, there were few people on the beaches. Nobody at all on the little stretch of Middle Point beach.

JL picking up fireworks trash, Middle Point (Click for larger image.)Kelp Bed at Slip Point. Sekiu in the distance. (Click for larger image.)Sea Sacs. (Halosaccion...) (Click for larger image.)

We talked about beaches, and creatures, and the future of the earth much of the way home, then fell into silence as we agreed it is about to be too late and we are not so much depressed as frightened.

Outer Coast Report, With Marine Layer

Grey day on the outer coast.

James Island, from the end of Rialto Jetty beach, July 10 (Click for larger image.)

The beach was absolutely teeming with people, it was like Coney Island out there. Sort of. At least close to the parking lot. :-) And grey marine layer notwithstanding, it was so warm and mild lots of people were walking in the water. People don't Swim, but many folks all ages were peeling off their shoes and joyfully, or gravely, being there in the edges of the ocean. I think we had not only the National Park tourists but also a large selection of locals fleeing the constant heat and sunshine further east, and gratefully cooling all the way down...

Near the parking lot, Rialto Beach, July 10. (Click for larger image.)Heat of course being a relative notion. We think 80 degrees is intolerable.

I performed the monthly hunt for beach-cast bird carcasses, and will fill out the forms reporting to COASST: no birds on the Rialto Jetty beach segment or the Ellen Creek beach segment. It's hard to pay attention when you KNOW you're not going to find anything, but I did my best, staying high on the berm, peering into the drift, thinking about beach processes.

Cooling all the way down. (Click for larger image.)

The seaweed in the wrack line was dry, baked by previous days of sun sun sun. There were a couple of excellent eagle manifestations, and one or a few cormorants merrily diving just outside the surf line. As the tide modestly receded it left a little fresh seaweed.

On the way home, there was sunshine only a few miles behind the beach, Lake Crescent glorious, blue sky over Port Angeles. But at dusk the marine layer fog had crept in along the Strait, and the foghorns were going as it got dark.

Walking in the Water, Looking North. Rialto Beach, July 10 (Click for larger image.)

Just In Case

Messing around with old posts again, shifting images into blogger which until now have been housed at my ISP. Just letting you know in case your RSS reader twitches when there are updates on old posts.

Daylight

The US Naval Observatory site that calculates Complete Sun and Moon Data for One Day is down. Even if you ignore the script in the sidebar <<<-- and go straight to the source, it's been coming up 'Service Unavailable' for a couple of days. I've been using timeanddate.com for Victoria. Wonder where they get their data. Not USNO, one presumes.

It doesn't show Civil Twilight. Too bad. Just when I'm thinking about the angle of the ecliptic, how the sunset light lingers still, and the line drawn on the sky among trees and clouds by Venus, Mars and Saturn, in Leo & Virgo, the latter two points barely visible in the long light of dusk.

Today Was Like This

July 4th. I think it was a lot wetter out at Rialto than it was in town. Eagles flapped by now and then, silently; and called out of the clouds, invisible.

Rialto Beach, Low Tide, Not Much Surf (Click for larger image.)

This time there were a lot of bryozoans and almost no hydroids. Plenty of different seaweeds. A lot a lot of small giant kelp (not shown). A few bits of bull kelp.

The bryozoan (moss animal) Flustrella (appearances notwithstanding, a colonial animal) (Click for larger image.) Alaria ; Codium (Click for larger image.)

The English names of these things are uniformly either completely artificial ('branch-spined bryozoan') or downright ugly ('dead man's fingers', not shown). 'Winged kelp' (Alaria) sounds ok, but I ask you: what kind of name is 'small giant kelp'? I think it's time to try to shove some proper binomial nomenclature into my poor old brain. Macrocystis integrifolia, for example.

There were a lot of people out, considerin' the conditions. Not exactly a surprise. It's the 4th of July. Summer's here, the time is right for dancing on the beach.♬

Carrying Four Books And

Carrying four library books and a paper from the Journal of Coastal Research, plus two guidebooks, I set forth to spend a few hours on the outer coast. Who knows what I will want to read. If it doesn't rain.

      

What Natasha Badhwar said.