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!
Boeing Field is constantly operating from both runways at the same time. The light aircraft traffic on the short runway can co-exist with whatever is underway on the main, long runway. However, despite the clear ATC instructions, there are occasional when things don’t quite go to plan. We had a Cirrus and a Grand caravan on approach to the parallel runways. I am not certain who was at fault, but from my angle, it appeared that the Cirrus was drifting off towards the wrong runway. It corrected its path but not before the pilot of the Grand Caravan decided that things were not looking good and went around. It didn’t take them long to get back around the pattern and the second approach was incident free. I don’t know whether the controllers ended up talking to either crew or not.
When watching the herons hunting in Juanita Bay, you never know exactly what they are going to catch. Something like a stickleback will be a relatively easy thing for them to swallow once they have caught it. On one occasion, though, a heron caught something a little longer. I am not good with different fish so can’t tell you what it was but it had a long body and a tail with some power. The heron had the front of the fish in its beak but the back end was still flailing around. The heron was hoping to win the battle but the fish made sure to give it some healthy whacks around the head before it finally succumbed.
A variety of ferry operators have made their way on to the blog over time. Today I get to add a new one for me. I was taking a WSF ferry to Bainbridge Island and, as we were departing Seattle’s Colman Dock, some Kitsap Ferries services were also arriving and departing. The light angles weren’t ideal but I figured I would add to my collection of ferry shots anyway. Maybe I will go back deliberately at some point in the future to get some better shots.
Just off Cattle Point on San Juan Island, there is a small island which, on the day we were visiting, was very popular with a load of gulls. While we were standing, looking in that direction, all of the gulls took off at once and were circling for a few minutes before they settled down again. I had assumed that a bird of prey was nearby to cause them to get airborne. There are plenty of eagles in the area. However, I couldn’t make out anything specific that had caused them to be startled. Maybe just one of them decided to take off and the rest followed just in case!
One weekend, I was at Boeing Field for a visiting warbird. I was pleasantly surprised to see some US Marine Corps helicopters across the field too. A combination of UH-1Y Venoms and AH-1Z Vipers were on the ramp. I had no idea if or when they would fly. However, luck was on my side as a Venom/Viper pair fired up and launched on a training mission. The rest stayed on the ramp while I was there but this pair taxied out to the main runway and then departed past my location. A nice extra!
Despite having lived in the area for over five years, for some reason, we had never been to St Edward State Park before. We went for a walk there that will get a separate post. In the center of the park is the old Seminary building which has now been converted into a hotel. With a nice sunny day to light it, it looked like a pretty interesting structure. No doubt, it has some interesting history too!
While I was down at Juanita Bay one weekend, a killdeer was hanging out on a muddy flat near me. It was busy extracting worms from the mud to snack on. The worms were not totally onboard with this plan and they were doing their best to stay in the mud. Some times the killdeer won the struggle and sometimes the worm did!
We had a quiet time with the hummingbirds in our back yard for a while. I am not sure where they went but they were not on the feeders very often. However, that has changed as summer has rolled on and we now have a ton of them in the yard, often fighting with each other over who gets to feed. I decided to go and stand out near one of the feeders and stay still to see whether I could get closer to them or not. Little did I realize how uninterested in me that they were.
After I had been there a few minutes, they came in to feed and also to check me out. They would fly up to me and then move around me, stopping as they went. I seemed to be a curiosity for a moment and then they lost interest. Instead they would start sparring with each other. Some dramatic aerial jousting would take place, often around me. It must have been something to see from our deck because it felt amazing being there. No pictures of that because it all happened at high speed but I was able to get some shots of them as they hovered near the feeder at the times when they weren’t in battles.
A little floatplane activity is always fun to watch for me and, aside from Kenmore, there is also the base at Renton. Situated at the north end of the Renton runway is the Will Rogers-Wiley Post Memorial Seaplane Base. It can be a good place to see some floatplanes in action. I was chatting to a guy there and he told me that he thought some of the planes had gone to land on the main runway but he was mistaken. Just as I was getting ready to head back to the car, a Cessna came flying down the length of the runway without landing as it set up for a water touchdown.
It turned towards me a little as it descended across the end of the field. It was behind the fence and I couldn’t get a decent shot off but I was able to pick it up as it flew out over the water and touched down. It taxied back to the dock and disgorged its passengers. I must try and be better prepared for an arrival like that at some point in the future.
