The beach in Eastsound seems to be made up heavily of shells. Walking across it felt like a very destructive act as the shells crunched under foot. I don’t recall ever being somewhere that was made up of so much shell material. It looked very attractive but I didn’t like the breakage that came with it!
The ferry terminal at Orcas isn’t the only dock available and it is the home of a boat used by the local Sheriff’s department. We didn’t often see them out and about while we were staying there but they did come by a couple of times. The boat is clearly capable of a good speed. No doubt, if you are the sheriff, you don’t want to be outrun by people that easily and you also need to be able to get to places promptly. That means power in the form of some chunky outboards. I suspect it is quite a fun boat to drive.
Eastsound is the main town on Orcas Island. As you head out of the town center towards the eastern side of the island, you go along the shoreline of a wide bay. The tide was out as we drove over that way and there were some frames set in to a section of the beach. Clearly this is an area which would be submerged at high tide so I assume it is used to farm something. Shellfish of some sort were what I assumed but I don’t know for sure. If anyone has any suggestions as to what they might be, please let me know in the comments.
On our previous trip to Orcas, we took in Cascades Falls as part of a hike. We repeated the hike this time but, since we started a little earlier in the day and the days were longer, we didn’t have quite the same pressure to make sure we got back before things got dark. Consequently, when we got to Cascade Falls, I was able to spend a bit more time taking the diversion down to the river to see the falls from lower angles and get some images and video that I hadn’t had a go at on the previous visit. While everything was a lot warmer than last time, there had been a fair bit of rain recently which meant the falls still had a good flow coming over them. As is the way with waterfalls, they look more impressive when you are at the bottom than when you are above them.
I walked out on to the jetty at Olga to look back at the shoreline. A short distance around the shore was an inlet which had about a dozen herons fishing within it. They were constantly stalking through the shallows and grabbing at fish as they passed by. With so many of them there, it must be a productive place to hunt. A heron drive through (or should that be fly through?).
All of the communities on Orcas Island are small but Olga, despite being pretty tiny, had caught my attention because of its store. Currently closed, this had been a long lived facility. The community is currently working to try and get it opened up again. I imagine it is going to be a struggle since there aren’t too many customers within range. Hopefully they can do something. We stopped off and had a brief wander around the area near the store and down to the water’s edge. With the sun out, it was a tranquil spot, even if we did wonder whether someone was going to come out and ask us what we were doing there. (They didn’t but we did feel like we were an oddity there.)
The holiday weekend meant the San Juan Islands were definitely the place to be if you had a boat. We saw plenty of boats coming and going including plenty of sailing boats. Some seemed either to be racing or training together too. I just grabbed some shots of the boats when I could. The evening light on a spinnaker really looks very nice.
Sunsets are a regular theme for photographers since they provide a scene that resonates with people. I have shot plenty of them myself. However, while on Orcas, I saw something in the sky which I was quite baffled by and taken with. The sun was setting in the west and, looking off in that direction, the sky was lighting up as you would expect. However, looking directly south, the sky was doing something very odd. I don’t know exactly what was happening but my guess is that there was a lot of moisture in the sky in that direction and it was reflecting the setting sun back in our direction. It was a localized effect and quite something to see.
One great feature of traveling to more remote areas away from the cities is the clear skies you can get at night. The ability to see plenty of stars when the sun has gone is great. With summer approaching, the sun takes quite a while to go down so I had to wait until quite late to get a shot that I wanted. I could have waited even later but I wasn’t that committed to the shot. I wasn’t using a fast lens so, even with higher ISO, I was still using a 30 second exposure. Even at 16mm, this still shows up some motion in the stars. Ideally, I would have taken a fast wide lens but I didn’t bother renting one for the trip so this will have to do.
Back to our trip to Orcas Island and our hike around Cascades Lake included a diversion to Cascade Falls. (See a naming theme here?). I had seen something about these falls online which had led me to think that they weren’t terribly large. I was, therefore, rather surprised to find out that this was a decent drop. We came in from the top of the falls so were looking down on them from above. The trail continues along the river and so we got to take a look at them from lower down as we continued on. They was a side trail that would take you right down to the water but we had a fair bit of walking to do before it got too dark so I avoided the diversion this time.
