August 18…. Where does the time go?

It’s been over a week since my last post, hard for me to fathom. Even though Susanne was gone, I stayed busy, going and seeing and doing.

Yesterday, we left Oregon “for good”, at least on this trip. I’m sure we’ll come back someday, we really liked it there. We moved up to Gig Harbor, across the water from Seattle Washington. A new state, a new place to explore. Today was just a maintenance day, working on the truck and trailer, gotta keep it all in motion. We’ll start exploring tomorrow.

Saturday my Susy made it back to me, I was so happy to see her again. It was a stressful trip for her, dealing with issues at our house, but it all pretty much worked out by the time she left. Almost any problem can be solved if you throw enough money at it. 😞

Last Thursday, I started my day at 4am and went fishing offshore from the port of Garibaldi Oregon. On the way to the fishing grounds, we tossed six crab pots overboard. Then we just motored around while the captain watched the fish finder and said “drop your lines”. The first couple of spots were duds, but eventually we were catching two fish at a time, using an upper and lower hook. Crazy!! No bait, just a piece of lead with a hook on the end. Drop it, jig it a few times, pull up a fish.

Fishing time ended way too soon for me, but everyone had quickly caught their limit of rockfish, so we had to stow the rods.

Slowly motoring back to the harbor, we spotted some whales, so we just meandered around whale watching for a while. We also were followed by a bald eagle for a while, so the deckhand fed him some fish heads.

We made it back to our crab pots and pulled the first one and it was PACKED with Dungeness crab. Some small, but lots of nice big ones. I took my turn at the rail and pulled a pot. That is hard work!! Should have worn gloves, my hands were sore, and the water was just crazy cold. One pot! Those Deadliest Catch guys are iron men! But if you want the crabs, I guess you gotta work for them.

I ended up with a big bag of rockfish filets and my share of crab was five big dungies. Cleaning the first crab was a mess, but I got some crab legs. The second I just tossed the body and kept the legs, but by the third and fourth, I had it all figured out. Friday was one of those un-civilized rains, where it rained all day long, so I stayed inside cleaning and eating crab all day. 😋

Throughout the week, I spent hours walking and pedaling around Fort Stevens State Park. Ft Stevens was originally an earthworks civil-war era fort, built to defend the Columbia River from Confederate raiders. It never saw action for that, but was ready just in case. In the 1890’s, coastal defense batteries were constructed in several locations around the grounds, again to protect the Columbia, and the army base was expanded several times, up until WWII when it was finally decommissioned and made into a state park.

Fort Stevens has the distinction of being the only place in the continental US to be attacked in WWII. A Japanese submarine lobbed 17 shells at the Oregon coast, waking up the soldiers and the surrounding townspeople. The only damage done was to a basketball court at the base.

I visited the Astoria Column. A 165 ft tall tower perched on a hill, overlooking Astoria and the Columbia. The column has an interior spiral stairway, 164 steps to the top platform. I counted. 😓

The outside of the column is a spiraling mural, all the way from bottom to top, chronicling the history of the area from Indians meeting the first white men, through Lewis and Clark arriving, up through the industrialization of Astoria.

As I rode or walked the park, elk were all over the place! Turn the corner and there they were, just staring at me, not caring enough to get out of my way.

All told, over the last week, I put another 300 miles on the truck, I walked over 20 miles and I pedaled another 70 miles on my bike. I’m up over 570 miles now. 😁