It's one of those days...
By the way, according to the US Drought Monitor, we are now officially Abnormally Dry.
That's not much compared to what they're experiencing in California or Texas. California is much improved, in fact, but it looks like they're having a catastrophe in Texas...
from Peninsula Daily News, last year in April.
It says high tide, and early morning. It says mid-April and later. It does not say, nobody does, what it is that draws them right up into the surf at First Beach.
I can't testify from my own experience, as I was nearly entirely unlucky last year. Started too early in the season, for one thing, and was already bored with never seeing them (and went back to frequenting the more beautiful Rialto Beach) before I got into the most likely part of the calendar. But also I had terrible luck. I'd walk up to people and ask if they were seeing whales, and they'd say, oh yesterday or a little while ago (or any time but now) they'd had good views. People would walk up to me on the beach and ask if I was seeing whales, and I'd say, 'Don't stand near me, I never see any.' I seriously imagined that the whales were saying, 'Erk! Miriam's on the beach! Let's leave!!'
The one time I had a sighting was April 21st. I'm thinking I might try harder this year to find a naturalist or biologist who knows anything about WHY they come into the cove at the south end of First Beach, and hang around near the surf line. It will give me something to think about while I fail to see them.
They're going to start testing the tsunami siren every month out here at Elwha, beginning today at noon. The head of the Community Emergency Response Team says in an email, "The 'chimes' tone is to be activated for 10 seconds, followed by a verbal message for about 15 seconds. The chimes tone is probably the most pleasant of the sounds programed into the siren." Really curious to hear what a pleasant chime tone which warns you that the ocean is about to rise up and cover you might sound like...
Washington Department of Natural Resources offers us a Tsunami Inundation Map of the Port Angeles, Washington, Area. And NOAA offers us a not very pertinent but entrancing .mov file of the inundation of Ocean Shores, down the coast a ways...
To Rialto Beach on the first of March. Goldeneyes on the Lake. Eagles at the beach. Goldeneyes and buffleheads on the river (no seal). Weather everywhere, and happy people out in it.
P.S., Saturday duck report from Ediz Hook. Just the usual: goldeneye, wigeon, lots of buffleheads. Gulls. Cormorants. (Cormorants. Belong to the order Pelecaniformes, along with frigatebirds and boobies other unfamiliar critters. Sibley says, "All are fish-eating waterbirds with four toes joined by webbing, but beyond that there are few similarities.") Only one big ship in harbor, a Polar tanker. Temporarily bored with ships.
I've been trying all morning to catch it with the mists out of the way. The actual official webcam link is broken, has been forever. But a little assiduous source code reading yielded the URL of the camera itself; not always working, but wowie at the moment.
P.S. M. is snowed in again. 2.5 feet. Zowie.
Woke up to about six inches of snow yesterday morning. Happily went out with the snowshovel and cleared the driveway down to asphalt, though as it turned out a sunny afternoon melted much of the snow around town.
We are still at only about 75% of the normal snow pack, but this certainly helped.
As I move on from Margaret Atwood to Stephen Booth, she asks the usual question: "How many books did you bring?" Happily I trot out my new standard answer: "I don't answer that question."
Gonna run out on the long travel day home. I'll have to do something about it before Tuesday, I don't have good luck in airport bookstores.
In Tuscon, where at the moment it is 72 degrees, whereas at home at the moment it is 33 degrees. T.-my-boss thinks it would be wonderful to go somewhere warm; but I gotta say, I moved to PA on purpose, left the sunbelt deserts on purpose, and could care less about being above, say, 65 degrees ever again.
My ma says, "It's a pretty day," as she has had occasion to do several hundred times a year for the last five decades. She too is living where she is on purpose. :-)
Murky weather on the flight to Seattle, murky weather heading south from SeaTac. Not much of a good look at anything until we were trailing along south just off the coast of Big Sur. Looked for gray whales, but from that height even boats were little, alas.
Orcanetwork has been reporting sightings of gray whales in Puget Sound, and various stations along the coast are reporting their first northbound whales. GraywhalesCount saw eight today. These must be mostly the young solo males. The mothers and babies (cow/calf pairs) are still down in the lagoons in Baja. I quite like the idea of some adventurous young whale dudes exploring Puget Sound instead of staying on the main track north, heading efficiently for the Bering Sea.
Pretty soon I'll have to resume the practice of failing to see gray whales at First Beach. But I'm going to wait until the cows and calves begin to appear at least as far north as Point Piedras Blancas— they are the ones who hug the shore, and play in the surf at First Beach later on. (A ranger at the Park visitor center told me he's booked his family to stay at La Push to look for them the weekend of April 25th. And he thinks they are most visible at high tide.
Here is the humble handmaiden of the muse of poetry, working on the next issue (#57) of the Santa Fe Poetry Broadside. The sky is blue, there's birds, the Strait is blue blue, Mount Baker shining crisp white against the horizon above the house with the red siding. Coho is back, singing out when he leaves or approaches the harbor, or passing the bottom of the street against the blue blue blue water.
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding my rapidly degrading powers of concentration, here I sit; making little web pages instead of being at the ocean. Tomorrow, if I'm good and stay on track (which of course I am not doing right now), I can go west.
The snowpack up in the Olympics is way below average. The snotel up on the ridge tells the story: hardly any new snow on top since the deep-freeze at the end of December. But it sure looks pretty up there today.
Went to Victoria on the ferry yesterday, hung around with W. for a few hours, ferried home again. I quite love going on a sea voyage to another country and having it be so easy :-) Nearly forgot to bring my passport; it does seem ridiculous to need a passport to go someplace I can see out my window.
Coho was all shiny clean in her fresh paint. Little Coast Guard boats escorted us to the international line (the purser said they do that on random occasions. Homeland security practice.) Heavy remodeling work was still going on at the ferry dock on the Victoria side.
Snow flurries Monday, frost every morning, thick grey clouds... although it cleared up this evening: the sky is cloudless, all the stars bright over M.'s house in the woods when I left there. Lights of Victoria bright on the other side of the Strait.
Spent Saturday afternoon at Rialto Beach, reading Katherine Paterson's Jip; sitting on a drift of small pebbles, leaning up against a log, watching the surf and filling my shirt pocket with little stones as I read. I've been feverishly pressing on with nonfiction books all week, there's a problem of library due dates and people waiting for the books; and it would be hard to say whether I was more hungry for the ocean or for being lost in a story. I read and watched, watched and read. Then came home again, satisfied.
Roshi complains that I keep sending him pictures of the same beach. I tell him it's because I always go to the same beach, and promise that the photographs are brand new each time. I refrain from pointing out that it's a peculiar complaint to be coming from someone who's been practicing zazen every morning of the world for the past fifty or so years.
Camera looks east.
