Charleston Seafood Festival

Fish head, fish heads, roly-poly fish heads. Bill and I went to check out the Charleston Seafood Festival on the 20th. The festival itself was pretty lame. They had a total of about 5 booths, none of which had seafood. They did however have beer, hotdogs, and scones, so I guess that covers the ‘festival’ part. And I suppose since they had a kiddy pool with fish in it and they hosted this on the pier that covers the seafood part, I guess. We spent about 5 minutes at the actual festival then went and walked the marina and took pictures of the boats and stuff. The fish heads are the results of this gentleman who was cleaning part of the Tuna catch that his boat was selling straight off the boat. I had no clue Bill had taken this picture until I was flipping through them and found my self eye to eye with them. The fisherman was attracting a lot of attention from the local wildlife looking for a free lunch. It was a lot of fun to watch the seals and sea lions just hang out and wait for the fisherman to through a bit over the railing. Then to watch all the birds try to scavenge that bit before the sea lion got to it. This guy in particular was the big dog. No other seals would go close enough to steal his lunch, this guy was huge!

After watching the feeding frenzy for a bit we continued on and walked the docks of the marina looking at all the different boats. Bill got some really nice shots of the marina. There were so many seagulls is almost impossible to take pictures without them in it. Not that we wanted shots without the birds, I think they really make the shot.

Bill also took the time to snap some shots of the seagulls for me, I think they are pretty. It’s fun to see how many different varieties there are just in this small part of the country. The birds where so curious about Bill they just kept turning their heads to watch him, I think they were waiting for him to drop some food. We were after all, at this point, standing on the little pier with the cleaning tables. So maybe they weren’t so curious about Bill, but about why he didn’t have food.

Another common site for this area are blue herons, snowy egrets, and pelicans. We don’t currently have any shots of the herons or egrets, but this guy was enjoying a swim and some flight time in the harbor. The pictures don’t show it very well, but he was absolutely huge. We got to watch him take off and land a couple of different times. We got shots of one take off, but he wasn’t close enough for them to really turn out very well, even with us shooting in a relatively large format. It was really something to see.

We had a good time that day, but it had nothing to do with the seafood festival. We’ve been having a good time on the Southern Oregon Coast. It’s been a bit chilly out here especially when the fog rolls in, but that’s ok. I just had to dig out my sweaters and jeans. I’ll be posting more soon about our trip to see the New Carissa, the trip out to Cape Blanco, and To Cape Perpetua. This will all be posted in the next week or so as I have time to go through the pictures we took.

;-)K

I'm a Slacker

Wow, I’m such a slacker. We got the guys off and back into Portland safely, and then we packed up and moved on the 26th of July. We were intending to stay in Missoula for a week and just unwind and break up the drive. Upon arrival in Missoula we decided we didn’t care to stay there, not for any particular reason other than it just didn’t feel right, so we pushed on to Spokane. We blew right past our exit in Spokane because of a car fire and decided that we didn’t want to bother turning around, so onto Portland. For anyone who’s curious, from where we were at in Montana to Portland is a long drive. Not like we aren’t used to those, but still.

We got into Portland at about 11pm on the night of the 26th and stayed for one week. This week was spent primarily running errands and trying to play catch up. We had some stuff o get out of the guys dorm room that we had shipped to them, had stuff to put in the storage unit, etc,etc. At the end of that week we moved to the Oregon Coast.

We didn’t think that we were going to get down here at all since the place we wanted to stay was booked solid for Labor Day Weekend, which Bill and I both forgot all about. But we called around to some other places and found one that had room for us.

So here we are now, on the Oregon Coast. It’s foggy and cold this morning, quite the contrast from the sun and 90 degree weather we had in Montana. The highs here have been in the low to mid 60s….bbbbrrrrrrr…chilly. I had to get out my jeans and sweatshirts.

Well, that’s about it for right now. We don’t know what our plans for the next few months are as far as were we are planning to stay. We’ll be figuring that out this next week.

;-)K