Coasties: Day Four
Picture, if you will, the surf pounding into the steep rocky shore. A crevasse in the stone leads the water almost beneath the promenade. A single wave fills the crevasse with foam. A second wave hits before the first recedes. A third wave starts to pound in after them, and the uncompressible water has no where to go but up.
It’s easy to get drenched at Depoe Bay. The promenade is, oh, 20 feet above high tide
Depoe Bay. The geysers shoot up twice that height.
We hung out for a long time, watching the spouting horns along the sea wall. It’s mesmerizing, and popular. Eventually we turned to see some of the other delights of town, such as a whale sculpture that intermittently fountained, and kitschy stores full of plastic scrimshaw.
We wandered through the whale watching center, which had tallied 6 whales so far of the winter migration. The grey whales pass Depoe bay 3 times a year during their travels up and down the continent, sometimes as close as spitting distance from the sea wall. More often, it’s 3 to 15 miles, and so the whale center has a bunch of huge windows and leashed binoculars. Today was too rough for locating spouts, but we’re thinking of coming back in early January, when they pass at an average of 3 whales per hour. I wonder if morning, evening, or afternoon will be the high end of the bell curve?
We weren’t going to find paddling weather practically anywhere, so we headed to camp, and then took a stroll along the beach. It was actively raining when we left camp, so we put on rain pants, rain jackets, rain hats, and with our poles headed up the beach.
The tide was just about full, so we had a narrow band of sand to hike on. Rain was blowing in my face, and the colorful items that had been washed up was all trash - bits of plastic and foam sandals and bottles and crap. It wasn’t occasional, but a thick line of the stuff that we were walking through. Then we passed the dead sea lion and it’s distinctive odor. I eventually expressed my level of fun or lack there of. I mean, this was getting depressing.
The rain morphed into a really low cloud, and we could see surfers in the mist ahead. They photogenic but not approachable, and we passed on by and headed up the headland staircase to see Devil’s Punchbowl from the top. The waves were crashing into the open seacave, and where surfers had been contemplating curls, there were now live sea lions riding the swells. We hiked down the other side of the headland to poke around in the tide pools of the Marine Garden. Didn’t see much in the way of sea life, but the visibility increased dramatically - there were patches of actual sky, even.
We stripped off the rainproof layer for the hike back, and traveled near the waterline, which had the effect of avoiding the trashline (and the dead sea lion). The sun was going down fast, and we walked swiftly to locate the path to camp before dark.