Research

This boat was working its way around Dungeness Bay last Monday. There are a couple of things they might have been looking for. Green crabs have been found here, an unwelcome, invasive species. And last month a fish farm in the San Juan Islands accidentally released tens of thousands of Atlantic salmon into Puget Sound waters. They don’t belong here either.

Lighthouse views

New Dungeness Light Station is a gem, located at the end of Dungeness Spit. It’s not easy to get to. For the hearty it’s a 5-mile (8 km.) beach walk, timed to avoid high tide. We took a watery route on Monday as we fished for crabs on the last day of the season. Not much luck on the crab front but the lighthouse views were great. It’s otherwise quite distant from land.

The Lighthouse is maintained by a volunteer association and for a fee members can be volunteer lighthouse keepers for a week. It’s a beautiful, remote, and different place to stay. Keepers greet visitors and do light maintenance around the site.

Can you tell it was a nice day to be on the water?

New trail

There’s a short new branch off one of our favorite trails in the Dungeness Recreation area. It’s the one on the right here. It replaces a steep pitch that branched downhill further ahead from the left hand trail. Thrill seeking bicyclists occasionally favored it but it was sometimes perilous. I managed to fall on it in the snow once while actually going uphill. I won’t miss it.

After the winds

I mentioned our fierce spring winds about a week ago here. Our plum tree wasn’t the only one in the area that took it hard.

We saw a number of damaged trees in the Dungeness Recreation Area on a walk a few days later.

These native willows aren’t the strongest trees around but the wind still has to be pretty robust to cause this sort of damage.

Spring winds

It was very windy on Tuesday, gale force all day and well into the night. DH wanted to investigate how the waters looked in Dungeness Bay, which as some sheltering influences. This shot can illustrate what he saw. Close in, where the water is less disturbed, is the bay. The line of land in the middle distance is Cline Spit, an important force in providing shelter to the bay. Further out is a thin strip of land. That’s the Dungeness Spit, another moderating influence. Beyond that, where you can see breaking waves and very choppy water, is the Strait of Juan de Fuca where anyone in their right mind would not have wanted to be.

I don’t exaggerate when I say it was windy. We lost a large piece of our plum tree to gusts. As you can see, it wasn’t as healthy as we might have thought and it was in need of a good pruning. But it takes some strong wind to tear apart a tree like that.