Oyster Blog — Farm work

A low pressure system has created extra high high tides and disarmingly high low tides for the past couple of days. Basically, the water hasn't gone out as far as expected... which makes work on the beach either wet and hurried or downright impossible.

It has been really, really cold here for the past week, and the Canal is full of floating ice bergs. Above, Nathan and Miguel are cutting their way through the ice to reach the oyster tubs. When the tide goes out it leaves solid sheets of ice on the intertidal beaches. Louie recalls that in 1949 Quilcene Bay and Pleasant Harbor Bay froze solid... and that somebody even took a horse and sleigh out on the ice. We're not asking for anything that spectacular, but we do hope to be ice skating by tomorrow on some of the area ponds....

We've had a string of really low tides this week, and so we sent the three graybeards out to dig geoduck and play in the mud. The old fashioned way to dig geoduck is to use a shovel and a bucket. But the bucket method takes a long time and has a pretty low success rate, so these guys used a water hose.   It looks like they had a scandalously good time. Eagles were also hanging out on the tideflats:

sorry for the string of corny posts... we'll get serious soon. But we can't resist sharing this photo. Helena took it on a walk last fall, a season when the woods on the Olympic Peninsula are golden, fragrant, and full of mushrooms. She swears that she didn't alter the mushroom in any way.