Soul Soothed by the Sea

On Thursday, work was infuriating.

On Friday, life was intensely busy.

On Saturday, Pinniped went up to Anderson Island for a gig. I spent an hour and a half waiting for the ferry in Steilacoom. An hour and a half on the pier in the sun, watching an unintentionally hilarious Woman versus Crab death-match, then wandering down to the dock to stick my bare toes in the water and tickle sea-anemones.

On the ferry ride back, we saw a pod of porpoises. I'm not sure whether they were harbor or Dahl's porpoises; they had dorsal fin color variation like a Dahl's, but I didn't see white flanks. Still, the more fin pictures I look at, the more I think it was Dahl's. At least five of them, too!

This morning, Erik, Kiyoko and I went kayaking for a few hours down where all the log rafts (and seals!) are. Seeing seals there is pretty much gaurunteed, which is why I thought it'd be a good place to take Kiyo-chan, but we were amazingly lucky. Not only did we get the usual Seal Escort, we saw lots of babies, including a nursing pup. (ZOMG, breastfeeding in public! Call the local busybody!). One mom-baby pair followed us a long way. Junior would come up very close to a boat -- literally six inches off my stern, once -- and then get shoo-d away by mom. He'd come up, and she'd pretty much shove him back under.

The babies aren't such sleek swimmers. An adult harbor seal can disappear without a noise, but the babies dive with a big ker-splash.

I'm feeling so amazingly right and content and wonderful after all my time by and on the water. The nasty work stuff just floated away. I need to spend quality time with my element more often.

EDIT: We heard the seals a lot more than usual this morning, too. I looked it up, and apparently the pups and moms vocalize much more than adults.

Woman versus Crab: Endurance Event of the Year!

Of all my Puget Sound related happiness over the weekend, the Woman/Crab show-down probably makes the best story.

I've grown up a water-baby among water-babies, and certain things just seem obvious. You can't put a boat in without getting your feet wet. Everything tastes better on the water. If you want to trap crab, you drop your crab-pot off the pier, go to the bar for an hour, and let nature (and the crab) take its course.

This is natural and right and the way the world has always been (except when there weren't bars).

There are, however, other... methods.

At the ferry pier in Steilacoom, with the tide mostly out, the water is shallow enough that you can see the bottom, including the occasional red rock crab. The pier was crawling with crabbers (and, occasionally, crab), and the only odd thing about most of the crabbing was that they didn't have to haul in to see whether they'd caught anything.

This woman, though.

She could see that crab. She had decided that it was going to be her crab. Passively waiting, trapping, didn't display enough get-up-and-go for her. No thrill of the chase.

No, she would take her baited crab trap, run around the pier with her head over the side, find her crab (which she'd apparently been following all morning) and drop the the crab pot on it from the pier twenty feet in the air.

This worked about as well as you'd expect. Pot hits water; pot descends, crab sees GIANT DESCENDING SKY THING and runs for its life.

Wash, rinse, and repeat.

There was no doubt about what she was doing. She narrated loudly to her husband the whole time. "There he is! I'm right on top of him! He's right there, under the sea-weed! Oooh, drop yours a foot to the left of mine, we'll get him!"

She chased that one crab around the whole damn ocean.

One of these small-brained animals had the basic instincts necessary for survival.

It wasn't the mammal.