It’s finally getting cold so there’s ice beginning to accumulate along the high tide line and icycles hanging down the riverbank. It’ll be down in the teens at night for a couple days if the variable weather reports are accurate this time. Meanwhile we’ve had several days of rain of an inch or more. The last rain loosened clay at two points on the river bank. The clay was mixed with soil or sand at the first place just where we reach the beach and washed over the beach like a five-foot-wide brown stain across the gray sand. Close to the twenty-foot high bank a couple pickup truck loads of the stuff are piled up, gooey and treacherous, unlike the second place down the beach around the promontory. A sheet of blue clay, there, a foot thick and some twenty feet square detached from the forty-foot high bank and collapsed into a chunky tumbled pile at the base.
A small sink hole has reappeared in the sand on the high side of the first jetty of concrete blocks close to the bank. Sand on the high side is level with the top of the concrete but below the base of these, several feet lower, on the other side, downstream. The hole is caused by water washing under the foot of the concrete hollowing out a space causing the sand to spill or leach out until the sink hole appears on the opposite side. Right now the hole is several small holes over a couple feet, close to the concrete and looks to be only a few inches deep. The previous version of this had filled in some months back when the tide and weather drove enough sand over the area. It takes a very high tide or strong wind to push sand this far in, fifty or sixty feet.
The sky is very clear today, but no contrails are visible except for very short tails from three jets high above. It’s windy, too, and more so on the way back; enough to blow a little sand across the beach. And with the cold it makes me wish for gloves.
Birds are still pretty scarce, but an eagle was out two days ago along with two herons. Usually only one heron is seen as we walk along. Daisy, the new black dog, is pretty scare, too, the last couple days. It might be due to the colder weather, but more likely that she just hasn’t been let out by the time Izzy and I do our walk.
Sand has been moved around enough over the last couple weeks so that the space under the one fallen tree trunk I have to crawl under requires getting down on your hands and knees instead of duck-walking under it. The tides have begun to move some of this out. The difference in height looks to be only about six inches between having to crawl or duck walk. At low-low tide the whole tree can be skirted, and close to the bank there’s a place where you can climb over at high tide, but going under is easier for an older guy….
No water men are out at all today. Days when the far-out oyster tongers have appeared they usually number in four to nine boats. Only one boat was out on New Year’s Day, the dredger that comes in close. Only Izzy was along that day and we encountered a black dog that looked much like Daisy except it had a dark collar while Daisy’s is fire engine red. Izzy knew it wasn’t Daisy right off and acted his normal aggressive little-dog self, driving off his opponent. The fellow in the close-in boat called to us then and explained it’s his dog. He lets the dog swim to shore for exercise, then swim back to the boat. Later I got a photo of the dog perched on the boat’s bow barking at a pelican that made a nearby water landing. I’ve not seen any other pelicans recently so that was another surprise.
On the way back I found a chunk of fossilized whale vertebrae about the size of two hands clasped together. It may not be part of a vertebrae, but seems to be to big and solid for any other part. It was only a portion of the vertebrae with part of one wing. The location was much further downstream than where some ten or eleven pieces have appeared in the past.
