Dry Wells, Birds & Boats

Spent a week at the cabin in Dungeness. Left Tuesday after work, worked remotely from the Sequim public library and Hurricane coffee on Wednesday and Thursday, took Friday and Monday off. Friday the weather was beautiful so that was sweet. The cabin’s kitchen sink wasn’t draining (it had been problematic for a month or two), so I called a local drain cleaning guy to snake our kitchen drain. It didn't help and he explained that our drain into the dry well had probably been sealed by food residue. He described how to fix it by digging out the drain and creating a new drain with an inverted bucket with a hole in it for the drain to enter. He used a radio transmitter to track the drain to the dry well and marked it for me.

I spent a few hours digging up the dry well, then expanding the hole a bit as I looked for the drain pipe. After about tripling the size of the hole I found the drain. I made the hole a little bigger so that I could climb into it and hunker down to reach the drain. A filthy job, it was hot & I wasn't wearing a shirt, and I was much too lazy to dig a big hole. Not a pretty picture – me squatting down in a hole only slightly bigger than myself, getting dirt all over my sweaty back, sides, arms and shoulders, hacking at the drain. Eventually we had an additional pile of gravel added, the inverted bucket with the drain running into it on top of the gravel, and several layers of tarp on top of that to keep the dirt out. Getting it filled back in and running the sink without it backing up was a huge relief. That and a nice shower. I know it wasn’t a pretty picture, I saw the photos my wife took. I also got a lot of lawn mowed - the cabin hasn't had a lot of use yet, and the weather is still mostly cool and damp so the grass gets out of hand pretty easily.

Birds were a theme of the trip. We saw adult and juvenile bald eagles, several family of quail, rufous chested towhees, a sparrow hawk, a kingfisher, red winged blackbirds, great blue herons, the usual gulls and sparrows and crows and grebes and ducks and robins and so on. We got a few pictures, the kingfisher was perched on the top of a stick that

had been stuck upright into muck before the tide came in, very photogenic although my picture is a little too far away and low resolution.

We went to Railroad Park in Sequim for lunch one day. The weather was nice and we found a nice picnic table with a view of the railroad bridge and the Dungeness river. Very pleasant. As we got ready to leave we checked out the new Audobon interpretive center in the park - it was excellent. They had probably 50 or 70 stuffed birds and a few other odds and ends like cougar. It was quite interesting, kept us busy oohing and ahhing over the birds for another hour.

A hawk and a few crows put on a show for us at the cabin. The crows would caw and fly at the hawk up in a tree. As they got close the hawk would start screaming “ditt-ditt-ditt-ditt” a few times, then launch himself at the crow and repeatedly strike at it with  his beak and talons. The crows were bigger and avoided him, so he’d fly over to a different tree and it would start again. Eventually the crows eased off in the afternoon and I want out to take the hawks picture – he was in a very visible position, and I had the camera on a tripod. I was optimistic that I could get some good shots. As soon as I stopped and began to focus on the hawk, he stared at me and screamed “ditt-ditt-ditt-ditt” and launched himself into the air before I could get a picture. He flew directly over my head, then flew back into a tree. As soon as I tried to set a shot up he repeated his screaming and over-flight until I finally gave up on the 5^th try. I got a picture of the hawk flying and 4 or 5 of it in the trees.

 

Traffic in the Straights of Juan De Fuca was mildly interesting. Every day we saw several container cargo ships, it seems like more of the outgoing ships are semi-full than was typical a few years ago, perhaps the week dollar is increasing exports. We saw a variety of small boats, a few cruise ships, a coast guard vessel, and an aircraft carrier. We saw the carrier when we were down the bluff playing in the lagoon inside the spit, so it appeared to rise above the spit and looked pretty cool with Mt. Baker in the background and the Dungeness Lighthouse on the horizon.

We took the boat out, but the waves started picking up in the late afternoon so we didn't spend long on the water. Crab season started the day AFTER we left, though. I was tempted to call in to my boss and take another day of vacation so that we could take the boat out and put the crab pots down, but lack of pre-planning, work pressure and lack of fishing licenses finally tipped the balance and we came home on Monday, a day later than we had originally planned.

We didn't do the hike up Mt. Zion and didn't hike out to the light house, but other than that we did all of the activities we planned on. A nice vacation, if a bit more too much work for it to be really restful.