Pacific Beach, last day

May, 2024

Awww, shucks, today is my last day here. I’ve had a great time. I’ve talked with so many wonderful people … campers and permanent homeowners, and shop owners, and Navy personnel, and kite fliers. Not to mention a few friendly dogs and one very beautiful Muscovy duck.

But, this is my last day here, so what should I do on my last day? Well, what I’ve loved most about being here at Pacific Beach State Park is walking the beach. So that’s what I did today. One walk in the morning, and another in the afternoon.

I thought I’d seen it all already. Ha! Not on your tintype! Today brought me new sights and new thoughts. If there’s one thing I’ve learned … there’s always more to learn. 🙂

So let’s get going this morning, get up and get dressed, have a bite of breakfast, and then let’s get out on that beach for this morning’s beach walk!

Whoa! It’s foggy out here! And it’s cold! This isn’t the sunny, warm weather that we’ve been having all this week. It’s not raining. But it’s cold and foggy and damp. It makes the ocean look even more mean and ornery!

But that’s ok. I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest (and been a boater) for most of my adult life and seen worse weather, including pouring rain! On the other hand, I sure would not want to be out on that water on the ocean this morning.

But walking on the beach? Sure enough good. 🙂 Let’s get going.

The log buried in the sand above drew my attention. Do you see the face (yes another face!) at the right end of that log? With its mouth open and a stick in its mouth? I think it wanted me to play fetch. I was tempted.

A perfect sand dollar (above) that had vestiges of its original soft spines still on it.

The photo above and the next two photos below are of foot prints in the sand. Who made them? Bird? Mammal? Unicorn?

 

On such a cold, grey, foggy day, there wasn’t much to look at in the distance, so I focused on what was right in front of me.

The photo below is part of the sandy beach that ocean waves flow over as they come ashore, right at the end of their travel … very shallow water, very gentle.

Notice the yellow parts of the beach in the lower right corner of the photo above.

Here’s a closeup, below. If you didn’t know it was a closeup of a very tiny part of a sandy beach, you might think it was a photo taken from a satellite of the huge estuary of a huge river where it empties into the ocean.

And then I started looking at the part of the beach that was just beyond those small waves coming onshore, where the sand was still moist from waves that had recently covered the area, but where the sand was dry enough that I could walk there.

All those little holes! And different shapes of the sand around them.

 

 

 

It took awhile, but after I’d been standing around out there studying these holes and their sand hills, eventually one of them spurted water out its hole.

So then I wanted a video! Well, it took me quite awhile to get a video. These creatures don’t blow water out their hole (don’t be rude!) very often. 🙂

My method to get a video was to find a hole that looked dry such that I thought it might blow water soon, and then I stood over that hole and watched it with camera ready. After a minute or two, when nothing happened, I moved on to another hole. Egads this took me a long time.

But I finally got a video, look!

Wasn’t that great? Thrill of lifetime, yes? Well, maybe not THAT exciting, but it was fun to watch.

Since I’ve spent so much time on the protected waters of Puget Sound where holes in the sand mean “clam”, I assumed these did too. But one of the park Rangers here told me that these holes (out on ocean beaches) are created by crabs, very tiny crabs, called “sand crabs” or “mole crabs” that burrow backwards (yes, butt first) into the sand until they are just barely covered by the sand. They don’t bury themselves deep in the sand at all. They bury themselves when the tide is out, when the ocean water is not covering that area of the beach. When the tide comes in such that the sand is again covered by ocean water, then the crabs come out and eat stuff that’s in the water. The park Ranger told me lots more, but I’d suggest taking a look HERE if you want more information, including a photo of one of these little critters.

But I’m jumping ahead a bit. I didn’t talk to the park Ranger until this afternoon, and in this blog post, it’s still morning. Just now, this morning, I reached the northern end of my walk and turned around and will now walk south back down the beach in this grey, foggy weather, back towards my campsite for a bite of lunch.

But as I walked south on the beach, I was amazed to see this (below) out on the water, out on the ocean. A boat! Heading north. It seemed awfully close to shore.

I zoomed in with the camera. At one point (below), the boat must have been in a trough in between waves, but it sure looked like it was sinking.

A few moments later, it was out of the trough, and back “up” again. But it really was close to shore and, in the photo below, it had turned slightly so that it was heading more towards shore. A moment or two later, the boat turned away from shore and then continued to head out into deeper water.

I watched for awhile, until I couldn’t see its lights anymore. Not that I could have done much of anything if it had run aground in those waves, but I wondered if their navigation system was not working … and if it wasn’t, maybe their communication systems weren’t working, and I could sure use my cell phone to call for help. But the boat had, by then, disappeared into the fog. I checked the news later, no reports of any boats running aground.

It took me about an hour to walk all the way back down the beach to the campground. In that time, the sky started to clear, the clouds started to lift, the fog dissipated.

And then I looked out to sea and found this … a boat heading south! But this boat was way out there, much further out from shore than the boat I saw earlier heading north in the fog. The boat in the photo below did not dip up and down in ocean troughs like that other one did. Maybe a little dip here and there. Maybe the wave tops were lower, and the trough bottoms were higher, when you got further out away from shore.

And that was enough excitement for me for one morning! Way more than I expected. I headed back to the campground and warm, comfortable, safe Towhee the Trailer for my lunch and a nice uneventful nap.

I’ll head out this afternoon for another beach walk, the last beach walk of this camping trip, and will share a bit of that with you in the next blog post. In the meantime, if you know who created any of those foot prints in the photos above, please let me know. Hopefully not some giant Rhinoceroses! Yikes. 🙂