The combination of high temperatures and low tides seems to have kick-started the summer scene at Shilshole Marina. Before this week, you would see more people out and about on their boats, but it was mostly racers or older gentlemen out getting ready for the season. Now, we’ve encountered the magic combination that is bringing everyone out for fun instead of just function.
A posse of very small girls have taken over Q and P docks, racing about on foot and in kayaks with small nets, stopping to peer down into the depths every few feet for new and strange examples of sea life. All manner of small creatures are captured and forcibly detained in buckets, awaiting what grisly fates I don’t yet know. You can track their exploits by damp footprints and bucket sloshes up and down the dock.
It’s not just the kids that are in on the act now, though. This morning I saw one grey-haired gentleman down on his knees, talking on his cell phone with his nose down near the water, tracking the progress of a small crab across the bottom. The tide is at -2, which isn’t the lowest of the year, but low enough that I swear some of the most shoreward boats are resting on their keels, and you could just about reach down and grab those little crabs if you wanted. One fellow on the next dock over appropriated one of the nets from the girls and lay down flat on his stomach splashing and flailing after something or other down there.
My wife has been carefully tracking the progress of the single remaining gosling from the flock of geese that have made their home around the stream outfall south of P dock. It seems like it gets bigger every day, going from ball of unidentifiable fluff to small proto-goose in a matter of weeks. It may be my imagination, but it seems like the geese are happier in the sunshine, too.
It’s nice to be able to have the hatches open now and sit here working while all the commotion outside filters in as background noise. It’s been a glum spring in Seattle, and for the whole nation in some respects… oil spills, financial troubles, long wars. At times, all that gloom and rain we were having just seemed the natural companion to everything else happening in the world.
But the return of sunshine, the families, and the simple illumination of nature going about its daily business a few feet below the keel brings a little joy back into the picture. Starfish don’t care about recessions.