August 30, 2018

Cloud Cover: Foggy. Wind Velocity: Calm/Light.

Number of people: 29. Number of dogs: 5. Walking or running: 5. Sitting: 6. Surfing: 18. Mostly saw surfers. All dogs seemed mostly under control, all off lead.

Total dead birds: 1. no leg band, looked like a common murre. Not yet partly eaten by vultures.

Seaweeds and seagrass, Animal casings (e.g., crab, shrimp molt), Wood pieces.

New stteps leading down to the beach, from the Alpine Chalets (in Otter Rock) and another access point not far away. The AC steps extended onto the beach & looked as though they could be partly lifted off the beach--good idea given that high energy waves reach as far as the base of that bluff.

Visible retreat of solid bluff. Usual signs of gradual erosion of the bluffs. There is no action to take.

Pleasant day for a walk.  Fog was present when I arrived at 2:50pm and had gotten thicker by the time I departed from the beach at 4pm.  The tide appeared to be rather high & still coming in during my time walking the mile.   According to the HMSC tide schedule, high tide was at 3:43 pm at South Beach, OR (maybe 8 miles south by the road), and was supposed to be 7.6'.  I don't know how to extrapolate as to how high the tide was between 2:50pm and 4pm on my mile.    I noticed that, despite the lack of breeze, the was a great deal of surf, some of that was due to the angle of beach slope over part of the mile--the waves broke strongly as they approached the shore.   However, there were what looked like pretty big waves considerably further out & they were still present when I walked north back towards Cape Foulweather and returned to a flatter section of beach.   So, it seemed like there was a relatively (for late summer) high energy system off shore.   Usually there's alot of driftlogs near an access point a little north of the Alpine Chalet access, there were none today, a signficant change from my last visit to the mile.    The creek/outflow (flowing through a deteriorating culvert under 101) was the lowest I remembering seeing in a couple of years.    In addition to the dead murre, I saw what looking like a single duck (possibly a female mallard) flying by near the bluffs, & a seagull hanging around in the area of the furthest reach of the waves onto the beach.    There are usually few birds on this beach, although on my last visit I saw an unusually large number of what I id'd as whimbrels (there were many to be seen this spring all the way to the north jetty in Newport (possibly further, that's as far south as I got this spring).   I didn't see much trash on this walk, despite the clear signs there'd been alot of people on the beach, footprints, pawprints, etc.