Thursday, July 07, 2011

Log Ships

Every day the behavior of the log ships grows more confusing. Timaru Star, you may remember, stopped here for a day or so, then left for Astoria. Spent several days moored off Astoria, then yesterday she sailed down to Coos Bay. Huh? Meanwhile, Cook Strait appeared at the T-pier and nothing happened for days. She had been at Astoria for a few days, and before that at Longview on the Columbia River. Huh? Every day I think, 'I'll go down to the harbor and take a picture of Cook Strait, try to understand what is happening, and make a blog post. Almost every day I don't.

Pacific Basin Cook Strait, Idle on Sunday, July 3, 2011 (Click for larger image.)

(I'm having a reading marathon, spend almost all my time on the couch mowing through the library books, but that's a topic for another post).

Someone took a gorgeous portrait of Cook Strait on Saturday, at a moment when something was definitely happening (note all the the log trucks lined up...) Way better than mine above. Go look at it. Thank you, Steven Blake. But by the time I went down to look Saturday afternoon quite early, all movement had stopped, no log trucks in sight, and the gate was locked.

Local news story on log exports, explains that these are all logs from private lands, by law logs from state and Federal lands must be for the domestic market. Letter in the Coos Bay paper about log exports. Seattle Times: Port Of Olympia busy with timber exports to Asia. None of this explains the apparently desultory movements of Pacific Basin's (and no I'm not going to give you a link to their web page and ship lists because it keeps crashing my browser) handysize shallow-draft bulk freighters. Timaru Star still seems to be idling off Coos Bay.

I think I need to go to the ocean.

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