A beach of a tale...

I never did tell the story of how PJ and I got beached...

It takes a while here to know and understand what the tides are going to do, but I am learning all the time.  Everywhere you go, they hand out these tide books, which tell you exactly what you can expect depending on the day, the month, the time, and where you are. Basically, there's a high and low tide in the am, and another high and low in the pm. It gets a little later each day, and cycles once a month with the moon.

I guess somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I knew that I would have trouble at some point - and that's what happened to PJ and I last week.  We were fishing and camping from the boat in a bay about an hours boat ride from Homer.  Toward evening, we looked at the tide charts - and decided to anchor our boat in 12 feet of water. Everything was fine, and we were sleeping soundly in the boat at 6:30 am when the lower unit began to rub on the bottom. PJ was closest, so he got up and trimmed the motor up - then went back to sleep.  About an hour later, we woke up and the sea was all gone.  The boat was on  dry land with no water for 30 feet.

Something like this is certainly not the end of the world.  There wasn't much else to do - so we just lazed about, slept in, did some beach combing, watched bears up on the mountain, and ate breakfast. It took 5 hours to be able to float the boat again - but it was amazing to watch the ocean's process.

Meanwhile I discovered clams that squirt water into the air after the tide recedes. You have to be fast when digging for them, because they can head down into the earth like a night crawler. Maria has special tools for this, and she'll teach me how eventually. The best days to go are when there is a minus tide - so it goes our farther and this is a bigger overall change. Clamming is popular here, so they can be challenging to find, and AK fish and game limits how many you can take.

I also discovered starfish lying all over the beach representing all the colors of the spectrum. Little minnows, bugs and crustaceans were in the shallows. Sea otters played gracefully out front. On the bright side.  With my binoculars,  I observed a sow and two cubs moving along the mountain above us - the cubs alternating between wrestling and standing on hind legs to spar.  On the bright side, I never would have seen all of this if we hadn't accidentally beached the boat.