The Beach

I have lived on or near beaches and islands most of my life. My earliest childhood memories are  beach memories. Memories like fishing with my father and bringing home our catch (usually crabs) for dinner. Or winter picnics on the deserted beach dressed in our snowsuits drinking tomato soup that my mother packed in a thermos bottle. We were at the beach constantly all year around for my entire childhood. Here is an early beach picture with my father. My home town ended in a bay that looked like this. Then there was a bridge to a long sandy beach that was nine miles long, Jones Beach. Nearby is Fire Island, Long Beach, and a hundred miles of other beaches like the Hamptons.

Since Franklin and I have been together we have lived on a number of beaches and islands such as Sanibel Island, Captiva Island, Highland Beach, and Ft Lauderdale Beach (all in Florida), Main Beach (Australia), Maui, Hawaii,  Manhattan Island and Roosevelt Island, New York, and probably a few more islands and beaches that I have forgotten. Each beach has its own characteristics. This one here in Oregon has large rocks and boulders both on the beach and in the water so the landscape changes with the tides. We have ocean views from every room in our house here and can keep track of the changes without even leaving the house. We even have a large telescope mounted in the bedroom to watch for whales. But we do leave the house. Franklin is walking 4 or 5 miles a day on the beach. Me- not quite as much but I do go down to the beach at least once a day.

The town is named Seal Rock and today  I saw a couple of seal on our beach this morning.

A seal lying on some ricks in Seal Rock

A group of seals in Seal Rock

Newport Seals on their wooden dock

They used to hang out here all the time (which is why the town, more than a hundred years old, is named Seal Rock) but the town of Newport (our closest town about 20 miles away) has nice wooden docks for them downtown in the harbor where they are a tourist attraction so they prefer to hang out there. Several times a year they leave to go out to sea to feed. What Franklin and I call 'going out to lunch." We are currently waiting for them to come back to Newport. I am pleased to see this one seal today and hope he is the first of the hundreds that should be showing up soon.

The rest of this blog is just some beach photos of our beach that I thought you might enjoy. They are all different views from the same half mile of beach.

Oh- that picture at the top of this blog with my name on it? Well, we were at the beach at the public park near our house the other day. There is a cliff there and I guess the sandstone cliff is soft stone. And apparently someone wrote their name- or my name-  in the cliff face.

A photoshopped photo of me on the beach. 

Some people walking on the beach. Possibly Hoa and Byron? 

Low Tide

Starfish and other sea creatures i a tidepool at low tide

Sorry this photo is blurry. I shot it on the wrong settings. The house on the top of the hill with all the windows- that's our house.

Oh- just one last beach picture. This was in the news today. It's a beach in Spain last week