I did not actually melt, unlike some.

Of course I celebrated the end of Oregon's rainy season with a 2-day camping trip to Hayden Island.
It rained all night both nights, but during the days there was enough time between showers to get things set up.
I had a lot of new gear this year, like a new tent, inexpensive but large for its price range and a real 3-season setup, speaking of setup, Of course I did not find the assembly instructions until it was up, which makes me ask how come they put the instructions in the bottom of the bag, why not put them in last so you find them before?. I just figured they must have been left in the box it came in and were still home on the floor with the box I haven't yet thrown away.
Once I figured out that you put the poles through the front short sleeve ,then through the back long center sleeve and then through the other short front sleeve, so the poles cross and recross like the arches on the Sauvie Island bridge would if you dropped acid and spent a long time looking at it, but the tent sprang up into shape and the full rain fly fitted just right and I didn't get so much as a drop of rain inside.

Sand, another story.
It being wet the sand clung to everything especially feet so every time I went in and out I brought a about a pound and a half of sand, so the little whisk broom I got out of the dumpster at the marina became my most cherished possession.
Self-inflating sleeping pads seem to take a bit of getting used to, adding or letting out tiny amounts of air makes a big difference, and I slept OK considering I was scared to take a sleeping pill the first night, then terrified even worse as herds of marauding deer crunched searching through my campsite for edibles all night long, I'm not kidding, in the morning the hoofprints were everywhere. I dont know why it gave me such a scare and re-scare all night, I know they are herbivores and won't really attack you but my feelings didn't get the memo and I laid there all night terrorized unmercifully. Until I did fall asleep gladly and slept until the sun was well up.
I say sun metaphorically, really the rain became visible was all, but eventually it did stop and I went for a long walk on the beach.

Where I found this guy.

This is the reason I did not go swimming at all. A hundred yards up the beach this seal lion has been dead so long that its skeleton has fallen out of the billowing shroud of skin and anchored the whole mess to the bottom.

I poked it with a stick, thinking maybe I could get the skull  and I could collect me some teeth but the bones aren't even in there any more. That part at the top of the photo that looks like the face is not the face. I don't know what it is. It is as if the whole thing has melted in some chemical vat or something. I had to wade out there to get within stick-poking distance, and my threshold for gore-suppression wasn't as elastic as I had hoped and I got grossed out sooner than science would have demanded. I am not a scientist, and I didn't get many answers but I did wonder what killed this thing.
Back in the 60s a dead sea lion washed up on Bastendorf Beach and laid there stinking all the summer of 64, so in the spring our surf club dug a big hole and buried it, but 2 weeks later a big storm rolled in and dug it up again, and it stank up the summer of 65 as well. It vanished that winter.
I will check it out later this summer and tell you if it is still there or not., but until then as far as I am concerned the beaches of Hayden Island are closed for swimming.

Bye Bye Sweet Charlotte

My pal Charlotte is moving back to Mill Valley, California this month. I will miss her.

When a sincere, lively, smart and sweet young person pays attention to me and listens to what I have to say it makes me want to be very careful to think before I speak, and that is a valuable and rare influence in my life.

Catching up Before it gets too hot to Post

I gotta catch this thing up so I'm throwing some unrelated events together with some photos. I fully expect to be very busy quite soon now that it is summer and time for actual boating.

Some people can only go to the plan. Some, like my pal, like to see where that little road goes.

When I took this picture from a little wide spot along the road that goes down to the harbor in Port Orford Oregon I did not know that there was a little house for sale right behind me. $79k. Makes me wish I wasn't quite so humble in my life-plan. I would like to see this out my front window every morning, even with a highway in between. I would not, however, like to freeze balls when the north wind blows 40 mph all blessed summer long.

Maggi and I took a trip down to the South Coast for a 12-step (anonymity) convention in Coos Bay, after which we went on down to Gold Beach, returning to Bullards beach where we spent a restful night in a cute and comfy little yurt with a skylight and bunkbeds and quiet mossy trees all around.

Very comfy and relatively cheap at $30 a night and you can cook on the campfire and sleep on a bed.

Back in Portland I spent the next two weeks painting and adzing and generally messing about in the boatyard getting ready for the new boating season.

Under a thin veneer of mud and rotten bark beat a heart of oak. Simple, stout, and free, rescued from a throwaway pile mouldering under the pines above the gully.

Made with my trusty sharp as the dickens shipwright's hand-axe a new crossing mast-partners out of a crooked piece of tree.

Look at the photos above and below and tell me if  you see what this rotten old log turned into. I love my little hand-axe and my little folding saw. I feel like I could recreate civilization by myself if I had these and a forest.

 Then I bolted that thing on there with a  half-dozen galvanized bolts and good to go. The other one I made, pretty as it was, simply lacked the bomb-proof brutal strength to abide in that role of getting beat to shit in any weather and be stumbled and fallen upon with out shift or complaint. This new chunk of oak does all that and laughs.

Upshot being that she was ready to go in the water this past week.

Sorry about the lack of pixels, a screen capture from a HD video is pretty much Low Def, still you get the, ahem, picture.

Nice.