09-17-09

Trinity and I got up at 5:00am to see the beach during the new-moon at a negative tide of .8 feet at 5:16. It was dark, cold and we were tired, but we got up and went anyway. We drove, and just like when I went to the full-moon low-tide there were deer standing on the road. The gate to the park that accesses the beach was shut. The park opens at 8:00. We parked and walked quietly around the gate. The park hosts are retired people in a motorhome. There’d been a switch in motorhomes recently. I assumed the hosts were new and that we were probably more familiar with the park than they were. We made it to the trail without incident. With no moon it was dark, very dark. We were going to bring flashlights, but forgot. My camera has an LED flashlight on it, so we used that to make it to the beach. It auto turns off and takes a few seconds to turn back on. We had to stop often in the dark while I held the button. We could hear the ocean long before we could see it. The stars were super bright. The beam from Cape Blanco’s Light House spun around and around cutting through the night. There was a brightly lit ship out in the ocean. Other than that there was no light. We stood listening to the crashing waves, watching the lighthouse swing around from the coast to the ocean and staring at the stars. Trinity pointed out two satellites crossing the sky in orbit. We wanted to hunt for agates at the extreme low-tide. It was too dark to see not only agates, but also the threatening waves in the rarely exposed agate zone. The sun wouldn’t be up for at least an hour, so we went home and went back to bed.
I woke up at 10:00am feeling refreshed. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day. I mowed the RV park and soaked in the sun.
Trinity and I went back to the beach for the afternoon low-tide to hunt for agates since we were unable to in the morning dark. It wasn’t a negative tide, but it was still pretty low; .7 feet. We’re both mesmerized by the hunt and obsessively scanned and dug in the sand. We wound up finding a lot of agates. We of course also got hit by sneaker waves because we’d get too focused on the sand. After a couple of hours we were satisfied with our collection, and cold and wet, so we headed back. It took forever. We walked at a snail’s pace. We couldn’t get our brains out of agate scanning mode and kept stopping to sift through the sand. Eventually we made it back to our shoes. We left them at the trail head, far from the ocean, due to Trinity almost losing her shoes to the ocean recently. Odds are people won’t steal shoes. Odds are the ocean will.