FISH STORIES.
Day 205 – Another busy, but productive day. This year the British Columbia Provincial Parks have started a new system for people making reservations at campgrounds. It’s a two-month rolling system, and reservations for a campsite cannot be made until two months before the first day you want to stay there – rather than their former reservation system which allowed people to make reservations more than a year in advance. (The Canadian National Parks still use the former rules.)
We were up early in order to be in a parking lot that had a signal. We needed to make a reservation for camping at Stamp River Provincial Park beginning July 4. The reservation calendar beginning that date opened at 7 a.m. Pacific Standard Time this morning. (Earlier we’d gone to the website and looking at the campground map, we guessed at five campsites that suited us, and we’d written down the top five site numbers in order of preference. When we logged on, three of those five picked campsites had already been taken by people who were arriving earlier than the 4th of July. All that mattered was that we got one of our five sites.) Logging in at precisely 7:00, we got one of the campsites we’d wanted. It’s a crapshoot really, LOL.
We drove to the Espresso Truck in Long Beach for coffee (yum), parked near the beach, and finished our research on things to do in British Columbia. We now have reservations for various sightseeing, bird watching, wildlife viewing, and whalewatching tours. We’ll be on Vancouver Island for most of the summer, so why not? Some of these reservations are pending, so it really would be helpful if we had a signal at our next campground. We are leaving tomorrow for Tokeland, Washington.
We had a few more places we wanted to stop at on the way back to the RV. We went to the boardwalk which runs along a stretch of the coast in Long Beach. We’d heard that there was a whale skeleton display – not much of the skeleton remained but they had a nice area honoring the whales that pass through during migration twice yearly. We drove to Waikiki Beach in Cape Disappointment where large waves had been photographed many times as they crashed onto the rocks at the cliffs. It was low tide, so the wave action was minimal, but we could certainly see the potential for those waves to hit the cliff with a lot of force in the right conditions. Two pretty Deer were also visiting the rocky shore. We went to the Lewis & Clark memorial; very nicely done. Then we went back to the RV to do some cooking and visit with the girls (who have been very lazy lately).
We did some cooking for a couple of days-worth of meals, then went out to the tent, read our books and took a nap. We were awakened by a man who was walking back from the beach and wanted to chat about fish. He said that he was here for the start of Halibut fishing season and that he comes every year for that, Salmon fishing, Ling Cod fishing, etc. He also told us several fishing stories and gave us some historical information. We believe some of these stories were Tall Tales! (How big were those fish he caught, really?!) And for example he said that long ago, Hawaiian Naval Officers came here aboard ships and as the boats entered the dangerous waters of the Columbia River/Pacific Ocean confluence, the Hawaiian soldiers jumped ship, swam ashore, and were accepted by the local Indian Tribes as their own tribal members, which is why there are many streets, beaches, and towns in this area of Washington that have Hawaiian names. Hmmmm…….And that this Park is called Cape Disappointment because of the many shipwrecks, it was so disappointing…….And that there was a place in the town of Chinook, east of the Park, where they brought in the Dungeness Crab, fresh-caught that morning, cleaned it, cooked it, packaged it for sale and sold it that same day until they’d run out of fish. Rob & I exchanged glances……
When the fisherman latched onto a park ranger and followed him around, we rushed to our car and drove out to Chinook, hoping he wasn’t making up the story of the fresh crab. It was close to 5 p.m. when we got there. A woman was selling amazing fresh crab out of a small building near a dock. We bought their last 2-1/2 pounds of crab. But the funny thing was the conversation that took place between the woman and a man who was working there: When Lewis & Clark came all the way across the country and they ended up at Cape Disappointment, it was so foggy and miserable that they were disappointed.
(The official story that we learned at the Columbia River Maritime Museum days ago in Astoria: The Cape was named on July 6, 1788 by British fur trader John Meares who was sailing south from Nootka Island in Canada in search of trade. He mistook the mouth of the Columbia River to be a bay which the ship could not enter due to a shallow shoal. Just missing the discovery of the River, mentioned by Francisco Antonio Mourelle, he named them Cape Disappointment and Deception Bay.)
When we got back to the RV, we made ourselves Crab Cocktail for an appetizer – really good crab. Dinner was Sea Bass baked in a Garlic Peanut Sauce over Brown Rice, with vegetables. Then Rob put up the screened tent and I finished cooking the rest of the food for the next several days. It was supposed to rain tonight, beginning several days of lousy weather.
For more detailed information about Cape Disappointment State Park, click here.