PCBs

This here is the center of my life these days. Well, not these exact days, but this past three years have been all about this sailboat the FelicityJane seen here at anchor in Willamette Cove with the St Johns Bridge in the background. There wasn’t much sun all summer so this cloudy evening was distressingly typical.

This particular evening I had the dinghy in the water and I was rowing around taking pictures of shit and looking for cool stuff washed up on the rocks along the shore. The only beach around there, as beaches go, is the very inner edge of the cove. Everything else is riprap or these weird puzzle blocks. But cool shit still washes up so I can still go beachcoming, which is pretty much my secret mania. Behind me you can’t see the railroad bridge, and beyond that towards town the beach was so contaminated with PCBs and heavy metals from the shipyards that used to line the river here so they paved it.

That’s right, paved it with articulated concrete blocks, interlocking  tessellated three by two blocks interwoven to keep the contaminated sand in place. It works for that, but it plays hell on your dinghy’s bottom paint when you run her up on the edge to salvage something or just to take a leak and look around. All I found that night worth picking up were a couple of foam blocks, rigid foam bread loaf sized and shaped pieces of rigid polyurethane foam, which I kept one to make an external float/fender for the bow of the dinghy. I figure the more built-in flotation you have the better to a point, and I don’t at all follow the blow-up-boat fad the inflatable thing yachtsmen these days have to have to look cool to themselves. Sheep.

But I had a nice night on the hook. Next day I ran into the lady from the Metro agency that deals with Willamette Cove and is trying to get it in shape in its transition from filthy Superfund Site to public park. Its about a 100 million dollar difference. Metro was given the cove for a dollar by the old owners who tore down the buildings that used to house a creosote plant in the cove. Apparently I had anchored in the most contaminated spot in the cove. She urged me to not eat the local fish, and to swim as little as possible, and to please please not careen my boat on the beach to scrape the bottom and wash off the growth with buckets of sand and a push broom like Larry Pardey does in all those Serrafyn books. Actually, I was planning to do just exactly that when she and her pal Ranger Rick cam walking up looking tense. I probably won’t, she made a convincing case, but I don’t think taking pictures of the sunset will be a problem.

Even if there isn't much of a sunset.