April 30, 2014

Report Details

We set out at eleven in the morning with me rowing the Second Sea Sprite, our eight-foot Walker Bay dinghy, down the Lower Fourmile Creek and across the New River to its West Bank.  With me were First Mate Blaine Rose and First Dog LucieAnne. We did not know at the time that it would be LucieAnne’s final visit to the Beach. The weather was sunny, very warm (perhaps nearly or even over seventy degrees) with a mild breeze from the north. We crossed the dunes, saw no gorse, but there was lots of vegetation and it seemed the dunes were now a hundred yards wide, wider than ever before. The sand past the foredune was about seventy-five yards wide. We found the visibility on the beach was very good with little or no spindrift so we could see all the way to Cape Blanco twelve miles to the south and the rocks in front of Bandon eight miles north. We headed south along what I think is Mile 93. We saw what I thought might be a sanderling, just one gull and three little shorebirds we thought might be Western Snowy Plovers. I took some photos of the little birds. The waves were modest, three feet from trough to crest at most. The colour of the water was beautiful. There was a lot of wood near the foredune, some milled and some pieces of trees. We found no whole shells, but parts of clams, sand dollars and crabs. We saw stuff floating out in the ocean, white but unclear what it was. We usually don’t see anything floating in the ocean except birds or pinnipeds (but not on Mile 93, only up near the mouth of the New River). Whatever it was, it appeared inanimate. The sand was hot underfoot. Actually, as we returned to the skiff, it was almost painfully hot under my bare feet. There was some bull kelp on the sand. We found a plastic fish pallet. We learned what it was from the nice young man who was Predator Control. He arrived on a four-wheeled ATV and came over to talk with us. He told us dogs were not allowed on the wet sand anymore. Apparently the rule changed last fall. We apologized and said we had not seen anything in the paper (The Western World). We also reported that there were no signs where we had beached our skiff across from the mouth of the Lower Fourmile Creek. He was very pleasant and mentioned that there was a fine of four hundred dollars for violations of the laws protecting the Snowy Plover but did not cite us. So we took LucieAnne and headed back, retracing our steps north along the beach and then across the dunes. Ah well, the little dog is getting too old for long walks with us anyways.