Day 262, Year 9: Happy Birthday, Patsy
Date: Thursday, July 10, 2014
Weather: Mostly Sunny, No Wind, High in the Upper 80’s F
Location: Quissett Harbor, Falmouth, Massachusetts
Happy birthday to my sister Patsy. I won’t mention her age, but I will say that I attended her 80th birthday party last summer. Unfortunately, Patsy had to spend her birthday at the dentist dealing with an abscessed tooth. Ouch! Not a very happy birthday present. We will be traveling to Williamsburg, Virginia in a couple of weeks for a Martin Family (my family) vacation and we’ll have to have a little birthday celebration then.
Our day started on a positive note. Before Mark’s surgery, we had tried to get our watermaker working with no luck. It actually worked but was pulling water into the pump but then pushing it back out (because the check valve was not working). At least Mark figured it was a problem with the check valve but didn’t have time to work on it until today. It took about one minute to remove a hose and stick a little screwdriver in to help seat the valve. Now we can start making water again. Hurray! We have two water tanks and one of them is empty now. We will take the boat to the dock this weekend to fill up and then we will try to run the water maker when we run the engine to charge and hope that will keep us in water from now on.
As we do each summer weekday, at 10 am we drove to Woods Hole to meet Jed (who delivers Jonah and Ollie to us), and to pick Sam up from his School of Science class. Today his class walked to the beach and watched periwinkles race. Periwinkles are marine snails encased in spiral shells about the size of a marble. At low tide, you find them grasping on to rocks. As with all snails, they move very slowly, so watching them race takes lots of patience. You mark your snail with a tiny dab of fingernail polish and then let it go. Sam enjoyed the races and when we picked him up he was ready for more fun at the beach. Jonah and Ollie agreed, so off we went to Woodneck. This is a sandy Buzzard’s Bay beach with sand dunes separating it from a huge mudflat area. It was the mudflat area that the boys were interested in as it makes for great marsh exploration at low tide. And it was nearing low tide when we arrived. We basically had the whole marsh to ourselves for the first hour and the boys collected lots of crabs—green crabs, fiddler crabs, hermit crabs, and baby horseshoe crabs. Sam and Jonah take this job very seriously and they set up a row of buckets on Sam’s body board and call this their lab. They become scientists and gather specimens as they pull around their traveling lab. Granddad discovered the secret to finding the horseshoe crabs and it didn’t take long for both Sam and Jonah to find their own. You just walk along in the shallow water and look for the trail in the sand left by the horseshoe crab as it moves along. Then look for the bump in the sand at the end of the trail and gently dig down and lift up the baby crab. They found one the size of the end of your thumb. So tiny. We shared our treasures with other people and they shared theirs with us. Some people with nets were finding pipe fish and others said they were finding small shrimp. When we were ready to leave we prepared to release our finds, but other children were so interested in seeing the various crabs that we let them take our catch with the promise that they would release the creatures soon. Next time we’ll take nets and see what other treasures we can discover.
 |
| 140710 Day 262 Cape Cod, USA–Marsh Exploration at Woodneck |
