Yaquina River Halloween

Every year, no matter where I've lived, sometime close to Halloween, I've ridden a tidal or river current in a rowboat to celebrate. This is not a superstition of any kind. For the last few years, the Coots have joined me for this long-standing tradition.

Fall rains combined with spring tides make for strong currents. Which make rowing easy, it's that simple.

How can you have fall rains and spring tides at the same time? Never mind that. The operative word is Rain. (yes, that's an uppercase R)

Which might explain the preponderance of motorized vessels on the river today with warm dry cabins. Some of the Coots are claiming seniority, ie: "I'm getting too old to sit out in the rain all day".

We won't hold it against them.

 It's very hard to predict the weather for this event. Last year, the fall run-off was on a pleasant sunny day. In fact, it was very nice the year before. And the archives tell us the weather was fine for 2009 and 2008 as well.

 Pacific Northwest rainforest.

Look closely, this is not a blurry shot.You can see the atmosphere. (quite literally)

For about ten minutes just after slack tide, as we left the dock, the rain stopped. You will note that as he gets the oars adjusted, Doryman is very happy.





A very short few minutes later, a symphony played on the water. Make no mistake. Doryman is still very happy.

Yaquina Halloween from doryman on Vimeo.

 One thing to watch for this time of year is all the floating debris. Some of those old boom logs lie just below the surface and have big spikes in them!
[When this area was first logged, a century ago, trees were skidded down to the water, where rafts of them were made, to float out to waiting ships. The logs were contained by chaining a perimeter of logs together. These were called boom logs and the chains were attached to them with spikes. Many of those old logs remain today, usually high on a river bank, until high water comes and shuffles them to a new beaching.]