Ahhhh... We Made It

Part two of our weekend at the coast.

As promised, the first two pictures are morning shots of the same shoreline and monolith as the sunset ones from the last post. Scroll down if you missed yesterdays post. I found it interesting how different the shots look even though they are taken from about the same vantage point.

This one to the right is "Haystack Rock" It's just under a mile off shore and is around three hundred feet tall. As you can imaging it is pretty impressive when you are standing in front of it. Some of the birds that use it as their sanctuary include : brown pelicans, migrating geese, cormorants, petrel and orange-footed puffin.

Supposedly the face of Chief Kiwanda can be seen on the south facing side (left side as you're viewing it). Personally I think it looks more like an ape with a pointy head. Who knows, maybe there's something here for all the evolutionist in the crowd.

On a side note, since I mentioned the word evolution, if we are supposed to be evolving from a less advanced civilization, can somebody please let me know how the hell we ended up with such a brain fart as our current president. Oh ya, some disillusioned people like me actually voted for the doofwad.

Alright, enough of that, back to the story at hand.

Day two was about as opposite from the first as one could get. Slept in until about eight in the morning. (I usually am up by 5:30, so eight really was a treat for me.) After coffee and breakfast we headed for the beach. It was one of those letter perfect days that you dream of. About 70-75 degrees with no wind at all. Just a gentle breeze whispering across the waves and sand. The sky was a beautiful clear blue too. No clouds, no fog, just blue in every direction. The icing on the cake was knowing that it was in the mid nineties back home. Ick!

We lathered up the boys and ourselves with sunscreen, pitched our beach umbrella in the sand and pulled up our chairs and the cooler. This is when Lisa and I looked at each other and said, "Ahhhh... We made it!" For the next few hours the boys had a great time testing their skills on the skim boards and boogy boards. They'd stay in the water until they were about half frozen and then come out and warm themselves on the beach like little lizards on a rock.

One really cool thing about this particular beach are the Dory boats that the local fisherman launch there. The first picture above shows a natural sandstone jetty that protects the boats from the surf as they make their way into the water. Watching them perform this acrobatic act is unbelievable. They drive down onto the beach and back the trailer up to the edge of the surf, release a pivot point on the trailer which tilts the back of the boat into the water, then they haul ass forward and park the truck up the beach a about a hundred or so feet away. At this point they jump out of the truck and run back to the boat and start pushing it into the surf, pointing the bow forward as they go. Generally there are at least two people doing this, but I have seen macho studs do this all by themselves. Once they get the boat floating they use long oars to get a little further out, and finally when they are deep enough they fire up the outboard motor and away they go.

Here's a picture of one that a couple I'm guessing who were in their sixties launched. It really is quite an art form.

When they come back in the whole process is reversed. They come ripping in at water skiing speeds and run the boat up onto the beach as far as they can. (The boats have a nearly flat bottom which enables them to do this). One person runs back to the truck and backs the trailer up to the boat and they wench it back up and on. A couple minutes later their off.

Well about this time it was time to get some lunch in us, so we headed back across the beach to the campsite and had a bite to eat.

We decided to take a trip up to Tillamook in the afternoon to take a look around. It is about 20 miles to the north and made for a nice short drive. There is the cheese making factory there, but we'd done that tour the year before and decided to skip it this time. We found a brochure that talked about a turn of the century steam train that takes a scenic ride up the tracks next to Nehalem Bay. We checked our watches and determined we might just make it to the "station" by four o'clock when the last ride of the day took off. We made it with about five minutes to spare and it was time for our next adventure.

Tune in tomorrow for the rest of the story.