Surprises in Surprise Cove, PWS

Surprise Cove turned into a surprise weekend getaway for Bryant and I. Wyatt was invited to a friend's camp for the weekend and when Gus found out he was the "lone ranger" on the sailboat for the weekend, he quickly got on the phone and rounded up a friend where he could spend the night. Imagine that, kids preferring to hang out with friends, and then thinking they are being tortured when they are forced to come with us. The truth is that both of them are learning quite a bit more about the ocean and also spending more time reading or listening to books on CD. So in the end and as years go by, I suspect they will look back on the "sailboat days" as being quite fun, and hopefully the torture treatment contributed to their intellect.

Even though it is nice seeing the boys experience the ocean, it is also nice to have the weekend to ourselves. We decided to meet up with Bryant's co-worker and his wife in Surprise Cove State Marine Park about 12 miles out of Whittier. They bought the same boat as us after seeing ours last fall. We left early Saturday morning and the day continued to brighten up. By late evening, we were all eating birthday cake in the cockpit of our boat witnessing an almost full moon rising in the horizon.

Although we tried trolling for salmon on the way out to our destination, we didn't catch any, which just meant we didn't have to clean blood and guts out of the boat. And sometimes that isn't so bad. Once we set anchor, Bryant inflated the dingy and we spent a considerable amount of time rowing around Surprise Cove jigging for rockfish and hiking on a nearby trail. Copious amounts of rain do wonders to the vegetation, and as long as it isn't raining buckets on me at the time of observation, I find myself quite impressed. Green moss coats and hangs from the spruce and hemlock trees. Skunk cabbage lines the boardwalk area through the bogs and salmonberries thrive in this moist environment, which I couldn't help but sample. They taste a little like a cross between a juicy rasberry and seedy blackberry.

I think one of the highlights of this trip had to be when it came time to pull the anchor. While Bryant is in charge of pulling shrimp pots 500 feet down, I put myself in charge of pulling anchor at 40 feet down. We often joke about the fact that people pay good money in a gym to get the exercise we get by pulling anchors. Anyway, nothing to unusual at first as I started to get the slack from the anchor line and stack it into the locker. Then, I yelled back to Bryant okay, "Okay pull us free." He gave the engine a little power to loosen the anchor from the deep mud so I could continue with my job. It wasn't long before I realized something was wrong.

Bryant came up front to help me pull. In the past, I've pulled in starfish, jellyfish, kelp, tiny rocks, and loads of mud in with our anchor line and nothing felt nearly as heavy as what we were pulling up now. I guessed it had to be a ton of kelp that we had gathered while circling around our anchor with the tide. To our astonishment and delight, we pulled up a 22 lb claw anchor and 20 feet of chain. Because of the lack of ocean grime on the anchor, we figured that sometime this summer someone hadn't tied the knot onto their chain very well and lost their anchor. Their disappointment of not having an anchor the next morning turned into our amazement of having two. Right now, we have a lighter danforth anchor and Bryant's been talking about buying a claw anchor. So imagine my statisfaction when I was able to give Bryant this unexpected birthday present from Surprise Cove.

For more photos of this trip: http://picasaweb.google.com/jillcaho/BryantSBDayPWS