Day 285, Year 8: Fishy, Crabby Kind of Day
Date: Thursday, August 15, 2013
Weather: Beautiful Day, Breezy, Still a Tad Cool (low 70’s)
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
When Sam wrote in his journal this afternoon, he wrote that today was “a fishy kind of day.” And I’m adding the “crabby” part. It was another wonderful, laid-back summer day. The only plan was to go to Stoney Beach here in Woods Hole. After today, I have only three more Camp Oma days with Sam and Jonah, so we wanted to get in at least this one more beach day. It has been cooler this week and it almost feels like fall. But the sky was blue and the sun was shining brightly, so it was perfect beach weather.
I picked the boys up on ‘the hill’ here in Woods Hole. The public radio station is up on the hill, so that is where Heather parks. There is a big climbing tree there, so we spent a bit of time climbing and then walked down the street to get in the dinghy and go out to Windbird. As we walked across the bridge, Sam and Jonah noticed that there was a very large dead fish lying on the rocks. This is not a common sight here, so we speculated on what could have happened to this fish (probably a Striper). I didn’t have my camera with me, so the boys wanted to go out to the boat to get Granddad and the camera and come back and take photos so we could try to identify the type of fish. Unfortunately, by the time we got back the tide had risen and the fish was far enough under the water that it was not possible to get a get a clear photo. So this was our first ‘fishy’ encounter of the day.
By this time, it was time for Granddad to catch the bus to work and for Sam, Jonah, and I to get to the beach. We can walk or drive to Stoney, but today we drove so we wouldn’t have to carry all of that beach gear. When we got there, Sam grabbed the huge bag of gear and took off to the beach. When did he get big enough to be the one carrying the gear? These little ones grow up so quickly! And I feel so blessed to be able to be here for part of the year to watch this. At Stoney Beach, we played in the water for a while and noticed that there were hundreds of baby shrimp or fish in the water all around us. This was our second ‘fishy’ encounter. We also discovered that there were jellies in the water that could sting us, so we had to be careful. This eventually drove us out of the water and up on the rock jetty to try and catch crabs. We learned how to do this the last time we were at Stoney, so Sam went to get the long pieces of beach grass that we use for ‘fishing poles’ and to get a rock to smash the periwinkle snails to give us our bait. There were two other children out on the jetty doing this already and we became partners in crime. Benjamin is five years-old and his sister Margaret is eight. They live near Boston but spend their summers on the Cape and both seemed to be quite knowledgable about sea life. We were watching minnows in the water and Margaret said they were Silverside minnows—just larger than usual. This was our next ‘fishy’ encounter. And then we started fishing for crabs. This was the ‘crabby’ part of the day. I caught the first and only one of the day. He was an Asian shore crab, an invasive species that seems to be taking over the rock jetties, but they sure are pretty. I worry about myself when I think I can spend almost two hours threading grass through snails and jigging for crabs, but I can and it was fun. Sam and Jonah loved it, but sooner that we would have liked, it was time to head back to Windbird for lunch and Jonah’s nap. We jumped in the water for one last swim and ran into a school of one inch long green fish that had come to shore and were literally jumping up out of the water. They looked like the blue-green chromies we might see on a coral reef, but there must be a northern counterpart. This was our last ‘fishy’ encounter of the day and then it was back to Windbird.
Tomorrow night Sam and Jonah are going to spend the night on Windbird and then on Saturday Mark and I will drive to Portsmouth, NH, for a birthday party for my good friend Sue Wolowitz. We will be back here for Mark to work on Sunday and then back to Portsmouth on Monday and Concord on Tuesday. So it will be a crazy weekend of driving, but a good time with friends. And by Tuesday night we should be back here on the Cape with a U-Haul full of our belongings from the New Hampshire storage unit—soon to become the Cape Cod storage unit.
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| 130815 Day 285 Cape Cod, USA–Headed to the Beach |
