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#1
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Boating story
One of the finer places we visited during our abbvreviated cruise:
Spencer Spit The oldest drift has smoldered in the invisible slow-fire of radiant summer sunlight. The solar energy that built the living wood reduces the dead. Icy claws of dark winter rains have removed rust red and yellow chunks. After a few seasons, the old logs are softened underfoot, like a luxurious pad beneath a green and grass-gold carpet. Pioneer stalks and stems sense nourishment here. They spring from cracks and creases in the bleached wood bones and reach for the light- until they are eaten by rabbits. Rabbits. There are hundreds of rabbits. Could there be thousands? They are dry thatch brown, driftwood gray, and mottled hues of black, red, and tan. In places, rabbit scat blankets the ground like uniform, coal black peas scattered from a busted crate. They are crazy in the underbrush and among the tidal flotsam, browsing endlessly on tender, emerald shoots and roots. The survivors keep a cautious distance and blend effectively into the ground. They are all betrayed by beaming signal flashes of white posteriors as they lope from feeding to feeding across the open ground. Keen-eyed owls, hawks, and eagles dive on the white flickers to snatch an evening meal. The energy that descended from the sun, (to be absorbed by the grasses and consumed by the rabbits), is carried heavenward again by birds. Birds. Birds abound in the vast salt marsh formed where Lopez Island is creeping inexorably toward its neighbor, (Frost), with the gravelly tentacle of Spencer Spit. Signs prohibit human incursion into the heart of the marsh. Gulls, herons, ducks, geese, and sandpipers gather to feast on sea creatures served up by the wash of the highest tides. Pickleweed, goose tongue, arrow grass, gumweed, stellaria and salt wort proliferate here. The mud has a dark, impregnated, smell- like hot peat moss or an ancient duck pond. Crusted and dry above the mean high tide line, the mud is copper and bronze, slate and yellow: scabs atop a fertile ooze teeming with life. Life. Spencer Spit is defined by life. It is forming, growing, reproducing, dying, and decaying simultaneously and has, therefore, no subjective awareness of time. Exempt from time, life can truly be said to be eternal on the spit. On the south side beach, great harrow rows of eel grass and seaweed toast to crisp and salty hay on a late summer afternoon. The vacant shells of ten thousand clams are crushed by waves and footfall to blend and bind the agates, the quartz, the granite, and the sandstone into a low-sloped bastion that will surrender to, yet endure the tides. Naked skeletons of wicked winter's windfall victims are tossed ashore beyond any high tide lines discernable on a laconic, September day. The forest browns surrender to whites and the whites before long to silver. Greens will morph to grays among the drift. Drift. The oldest drift has smoldered in the invisible slow-fire… We put in at Spencer Spit State Park, off the east shore of Lopez Island, in mid-September. Past Labor Day, we had no difficulty securing one about two dozen mooring buoys sited on the north and south sides of the spit. The buoys here could easily be full during peak season, but there is ample room for prudent anchoring. Once secured to a buoy, our GPS read 48.32.37N and 122.51.35W. We rowed ashore. The vivid grandeur of the natural environment is evident well out into the bay. It would seem almost criminal to fire up a noisy outboard motor. Washington State Parks acquired Spencer Spit and the adjacent uplands in 1981. Theodore Spencer was the original homesteader on the site, and he built a log cabin on the beach in 1917. The original cabin fell to the onslaught of the elements, but was rebuilt on the original site and to original specifications in 1978. Like Spencer's original cabin, the 1978 recreation was built entirely with logs and timbers scavenged from the tide piles on the beach. A visit to Spencer Spit allows an insight into an unspoiled time now vanished from the San Juans. Swinging around the State Park mooring buoys, a boater views the steep, bald, backside of Frost Island, the barren mound of Flower, and relatively unpopulated shorelines of Lopez, Blakely, and Decatur. There are few homes in sight, and no resorts. Spencer Spit commemorates the pre-human eons in the islands, with little evidence of civilized "improvements" on the beach except Spencer's log cabin and the temporary driftwood forts erected by energetic young boys. We hiked around the park, enthralled with an environment so fecund with vitality. When we eventually circled around to where we had beached the Zodiac, Jan wandered a bit farther down the beach to contemplate the myriad forms and colors of the gravel gems. I sat on the starboard tube and examined the intricate dramas in a square foot of sand between my boat shoes. Scores of sand fleas cavorted between the grains, leaping to altitudes 100 times their own height. Other, mysterious, insects burrowed just beneath the grit and granite, while buzzing, monstrous, carnivorous yellow jackets carried away their unlucky or unwary insect prey. Just then, a tiny spider, (no larger than a pinpoint and red as a neon rose), scrambled daringly across the vast, exposed, expanse of a single pebble and disappeared safely beneath another. The red speck of a spider would not, on this day, become a yellow jacket feast. I gathered a few beach pebbles in my hand. To that small red spider, one billionth as large as I, do such pebbles seem a billion times as large? Are they the boulders, the hills, the mountains, and the islands of his crimson-backed world? Such are the questions one can ponder on Spencer Spit. Next time in the San Juans, set aside a day to spend a thousand years on Spencer Spit. |
#3
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Boating story
That was very nice. How about some pix?
Gould 0738 wrote: One of the finer places we visited during our abbvreviated cruise: Spencer Spit The oldest drift has smoldered in the invisible slow-fire of radiant summer sunlight. The solar energy that built the living wood reduces the dead. Icy claws of dark winter rains have removed rust red and yellow chunks. After a few seasons, the old logs are softened underfoot, like a luxurious pad beneath a green and grass-gold carpet. Pioneer stalks and stems sense nourishment here. They spring from cracks and creases in the bleached wood bones and reach for the light- until they are eaten by rabbits. Rabbits. There are hundreds of rabbits. Could there be thousands? They are dry thatch brown, driftwood gray, and mottled hues of black, red, and tan. In places, rabbit scat blankets the ground like uniform, coal black peas scattered from a busted crate. They are crazy in the underbrush and among the tidal flotsam, browsing endlessly on tender, emerald shoots and roots. The survivors keep a cautious distance and blend effectively into the ground. They are all betrayed by beaming signal flashes of white posteriors as they lope from feeding to feeding across the open ground. Keen-eyed owls, hawks, and eagles dive on the white flickers to snatch an evening meal. The energy that descended from the sun, (to be absorbed by the grasses and consumed by the rabbits), is carried heavenward again by birds. Birds. Birds abound in the vast salt marsh formed where Lopez Island is creeping inexorably toward its neighbor, (Frost), with the gravelly tentacle of Spencer Spit. Signs prohibit human incursion into the heart of the marsh. Gulls, herons, ducks, geese, and sandpipers gather to feast on sea creatures served up by the wash of the highest tides. Pickleweed, goose tongue, arrow grass, gumweed, stellaria and salt wort proliferate here. The mud has a dark, impregnated, smell- like hot peat moss or an ancient duck pond. Crusted and dry above the mean high tide line, the mud is copper and bronze, slate and yellow: scabs atop a fertile ooze teeming with life. Life. Spencer Spit is defined by life. It is forming, growing, reproducing, dying, and decaying simultaneously and has, therefore, no subjective awareness of time. Exempt from time, life can truly be said to be eternal on the spit. On the south side beach, great harrow rows of eel grass and seaweed toast to crisp and salty hay on a late summer afternoon. The vacant shells of ten thousand clams are crushed by waves and footfall to blend and bind the agates, the quartz, the granite, and the sandstone into a low-sloped bastion that will surrender to, yet endure the tides. Naked skeletons of wicked winter's windfall victims are tossed ashore beyond any high tide lines discernable on a laconic, September day. The forest browns surrender to whites and the whites before long to silver. Greens will morph to grays among the drift. Drift. The oldest drift has smoldered in the invisible slow-fire… We put in at Spencer Spit State Park, off the east shore of Lopez Island, in mid-September. Past Labor Day, we had no difficulty securing one about two dozen mooring buoys sited on the north and south sides of the spit. The buoys here could easily be full during peak season, but there is ample room for prudent anchoring. Once secured to a buoy, our GPS read 48.32.37N and 122.51.35W. We rowed ashore. The vivid grandeur of the natural environment is evident well out into the bay. It would seem almost criminal to fire up a noisy outboard motor. Washington State Parks acquired Spencer Spit and the adjacent uplands in 1981. Theodore Spencer was the original homesteader on the site, and he built a log cabin on the beach in 1917. The original cabin fell to the onslaught of the elements, but was rebuilt on the original site and to original specifications in 1978. Like Spencer's original cabin, the 1978 recreation was built entirely with logs and timbers scavenged from the tide piles on the beach. A visit to Spencer Spit allows an insight into an unspoiled time now vanished from the San Juans. Swinging around the State Park mooring buoys, a boater views the steep, bald, backside of Frost Island, the barren mound of Flower, and relatively unpopulated shorelines of Lopez, Blakely, and Decatur. There are few homes in sight, and no resorts. Spencer Spit commemorates the pre-human eons in the islands, with little evidence of civilized "improvements" on the beach except Spencer's log cabin and the temporary driftwood forts erected by energetic young boys. We hiked around the park, enthralled with an environment so fecund with vitality. When we eventually circled around to where we had beached the Zodiac, Jan wandered a bit farther down the beach to contemplate the myriad forms and colors of the gravel gems. I sat on the starboard tube and examined the intricate dramas in a square foot of sand between my boat shoes. Scores of sand fleas cavorted between the grains, leaping to altitudes 100 times their own height. Other, mysterious, insects burrowed just beneath the grit and granite, while buzzing, monstrous, carnivorous yellow jackets carried away their unlucky or unwary insect prey. Just then, a tiny spider, (no larger than a pinpoint and red as a neon rose), scrambled daringly across the vast, exposed, expanse of a single pebble and disappeared safely beneath another. The red speck of a spider would not, on this day, become a yellow jacket feast. I gathered a few beach pebbles in my hand. To that small red spider, one billionth as large as I, do such pebbles seem a billion times as large? Are they the boulders, the hills, the mountains, and the islands of his crimson-backed world? Such are the questions one can ponder on Spencer Spit. Next time in the San Juans, set aside a day to spend a thousand years on Spencer Spit. |
#4
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Boating story
That was very nice. How about some pix?
The group doesn't support photos. I have eight or nine rolls of film to sort through, and scan the "keepers". Possibly this evening. Send me a request, (so I don't have to try to remember otherwise), and I will send you a zip file with a few photos from Spencer Spit. Same for anybody else, of course. |
#5
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Boating story
Just post them on a binary newsgroup and post a link.
alt.binaries.pictures.fishing is one group. Bill "Gould 0738" wrote in message ... That was very nice. How about some pix? The group doesn't support photos. I have eight or nine rolls of film to sort through, and scan the "keepers". Possibly this evening. Send me a request, (so I don't have to try to remember otherwise), and I will send you a zip file with a few photos from Spencer Spit. Same for anybody else, of course. |
#6
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Boating story
That will be great. I will post them on my website and set a url so
anyone that wishes can see them. Capt. Frank Remove REMOVE from my email address. To prevent email address harvesting my evil spiders. my " address is under attack by the mad virus spammer. Your message may not get through. http://www.home.earthlink.net/~aartworks Gould 0738 wrote: That was very nice. How about some pix? The group doesn't support photos. I have eight or nine rolls of film to sort through, and scan the "keepers". Possibly this evening. Send me a request, (so I don't have to try to remember otherwise), and I will send you a zip file with a few photos from Spencer Spit. Same for anybody else, of course. |
#7
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Boating story
Just post them on a binary newsgroup and post a link.
alt.binaries.pictures.fishing is one group. Bill They're in the email to Frank Hopkins. He has offered to put them on his wep page and post a link. Thanks, Capt. Frank! |
#8
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Boating story
The pictures are up. I had to chew on them a bit to make them fit into a
hard drive, but they are still plenty big. The URL http://www.home.earthlink.net/~aartworks and take the link to Gould's voyage pictures. Gould 0738 wrote: Just post them on a binary newsgroup and post a link. alt.binaries.pictures.fishing is one group. Bill They're in the email to Frank Hopkins. He has offered to put them on his wep page and post a link. Thanks, Capt. Frank! |
#9
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Boating story
Wow!
Super nice job, Capt. Frank! Most sincere thanks. :-) |
#10
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Boating story
Wow, very nice.
I want to be on that trawler in the first picture. "Capt. Frank Hopkins" wrote in message ink.net... The pictures are up. I had to chew on them a bit to make them fit into a hard drive, but they are still plenty big. The URL http://www.home.earthlink.net/~aartworks and take the link to Gould's voyage pictures. Gould 0738 wrote: Just post them on a binary newsgroup and post a link. alt.binaries.pictures.fishing is one group. Bill They're in the email to Frank Hopkins. He has offered to put them on his wep page and post a link. Thanks, Capt. Frank! |
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