Water Music
Beautiful day here today. I got out on a kayaking expedition on Puget Sound. More expansive post after we get back from dinner (Click to enlarge):
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Later…
As promised. I belong to a couple of Yahoo! groups dealing with sea kayaking in the Seattle area, and showed up for a scheduled day trip at Golden Gardens, a Seattle park on Puget Sound. One other guy was there, and we launched from the beach:
We first paddled north along the shore, up to Carkeek Park, then turned around and headed south, bound for West Point in Seattle’s Discovery Park. The sound was uncharacteristically placid, almost like glass where we were paddling, but some hopeful sailors were nonetheless participating in a regatta of some sort. It appears that there was just enough wind out in the middle of the sound to fill their spinnakers:
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There’s a lighthouse at West Point, and for reasons of Homeland Security that eluded us myopic citizens, it was sounding a foghorn every 20 seconds or so, despite the fact that visibility in every direction was absolutely perfect. As we rounded the point, as it will even to jaded long-time residents, Mount Rainier caught us completely by surprise, looming above the cranes of the Port of Seattle:
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As we were paddling back to Golden Gardens through Shilshole Marina, I saw my companion, out of the corner of my eye, raise a bottle of brown liquid to his face. I’d never paddled with him before, but I’ve been out with others who might nip from a stylish silver flask now & then. I’d just never seen anyone slugging from a full fifth of whiskey before, at least not until we got the tents up and the fire started.
He maintains that he found the bottle floating in the water - plausible enough among the thicket of masts at Shilshole that hosts a fair number of live-aboards. When we got back to Golden Gardens, he made a great show of going over to a wastebasket and banging the bottle on the lid. I took his word that he threw it away, but I nonetheless gave him a sizeable head start out of the parking lot.
An altogether pleasant and amiable way to spend a summer day in February
Crap. I thought the Seattle-Bremerton run was taking cars again.
oh marclord beat me to it. i guess the joke was obvious. i was thinking it must be a new ferry for port townsend.
Oh, you guys are rogues. I’m not sure exactly what that structure is. There are two of them around the mouth of the entrance to the ship canal, and they seem to be commercial tie-ups. There is actually a floating structure for the sea lions to haul out, but it’s been moved further southwest for some reason. You haven’t lived until you’ve smelled sea-lion-breath when one surfaces adjacent to your kayak.
Just Wow! Great pictures.
Thanks, Janet!
I remember when I lived in Boulder, Co there was always a week in February that was like summer. It was a grand respite between storms to actually go outside in short-sleeves and hike around with the sun on our backs. It’s the best part of February, and I am always glad to see it happen here in the northwest too. Beautiful photographs.
This post makes me wish we were back house sitting “now!”
I’m not sure I’d neck the contents of a brown bottle I found floating in the sea, especially if what was in it looked a bit like whiskey!